Part 6 (2/2)

MARRIAGE: 1. A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite s.e.x solemnly agree to hara.s.s and spy on each other for ninety-nine years, or until death do them join. 2. A way-station, not the end of the journey. 3. The aspiration of two vowels to be a diphthong. 4. Love's demita.s.se.

MAYOR: 1. _Particeps criminis._ 2. The head and front of our offending.

3. Polonius Pecksniff, who plays Bottom for a stipend. 4. A chaste, honorable, virtuous person whose private life is made inviolable by the libel laws. 5. A p.r.i.c.kly sensation in the back of Folly and Revelry. 6.

The culmination, zenith, equator and pediment of self-sufficient mediocrity. 7. A crow's-nest from which one may see the perpetually receding horizons of the Governors.h.i.+p and the Presidency. 8. A chef of morality. 9. Any person afflicted with primary, secondary or tertiary holiness. 10. A palm-reader. 11. A nebulous cl.u.s.ter of thought-embryons resolved into a gaseous state. 12. The nosebag of public decency. 13.

The _alter ego_ of organized cant. 14. The critic of impure reason. 15.

Lobster emeritus. 16. A person who takes an oath to love, honor and obey Tartuffe.

MANHOLES: The apertures in a peekaboo s.h.i.+rtwaist.

MARTYR: Any man who is willing to sacrifice others for his ”cause.”

MASTER-MAN: A man who is master of one person--himself.

MASTERs.h.i.+P: Industry, concentration, self-confidence.

MATHEMATICS: A tentative agreement that two and two make four.

MATTEAWAN: The antechamber of liberty for a murder-gent.

MILITARISM: A fever for conquest, with Peace for a s.h.i.+eld, using music and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons to dazzle and divert the Populace.

MERCY: 1. The charity of tyrants. 2. The forgiveness of one scoundrel by another. 3. The culmination of the Will-to-Power and its final apotheosis. 4. A quality which, like soup, the more it is strained the less soup and the more water you have. 5. In war a universal mode of subjugating a people.

MEPHISTO: The fourth person in the Holy Trinity.

MILITANCY: A fixed, fighting mental att.i.tude that will never know when the war is over.

MIDNIGHT: 1. The Pole of the hours; a pincus.h.i.+on on which sparkle all the seconds of a day; the keel of the good s.h.i.+p Tomorrow. 2. A chimney whence the dreams of today issue in smoke.

METAPHYSICS: 1. An attempt to define a thing and by so doing escape the bother of understanding it. 2. The explanation of a thing by a person who does not understand it.

MIDDLEMAN: One who works both ends against the middle.

MILLENNIUM: 1. A thousand years beginning with Now and ending with Then.

2. A mythical period when every one will pay his debts and begin tomorrow again on renewed credit. 3. A religious cycle which has no visible means of support, even admitting the ideality of time. Hence, by extension and usage--[Here insert a Mergenthaler pi line of thirty-two ems.]

MAMMON: The Pope of Protestantism.

MUCKRAKER: One who sits on the fence and defames American enterprise as it marches by.

MIRACLE: 1. A happening seen by four men at once, but by no one man in particular--hence, a collective, but otherwise untrue, fact. 2. The minutiae of cosmologies. 3. A physical event described by those to whom it was related by men who did not see it. 4. A portent that precedes the coming of a Liar with letters patent from Nowhere, or a series of extraordinary occurrences that attend his comings and goings and mouthings that in no way equal in majesty, beauty or mystery the simplest commonplace of his life. (No G.o.d, demiG.o.d, or other parasite of human ignorance is complete without miracles, for it is only the natural and commonplace that are unbelievable.)

MOTHERHOOD: The headliner in G.o.d's great vaudeville.

MISSIONARIES: Sincere, self-deceived persons suffering from meddler's itch.

<script>