Part 8 (1/2)

PERFUME: Any smell that is used to down a worse one.

PHILOSOPHY: Our highest conception of life, its duties and its destinies.

POLITICIANS: 1. Men who volunteer the task of governing us for a consideration. 2. See Graftheimer.

PERICLES: See Aspasia.

PESSIMIST: 1. One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.

2. The official vinegar-taster to Setebos.

PIETY: 1. The tinfoil of pretense. 2. That feeling of reverence we have toward the Almighty on account of His supposed resemblance to ourselves.

PUBLISHER: 1. An emunctory business, first functioned by Barabbas. 2.

One of a band of panders which sprang into existence soon after the death of Gutenberg and which now overruns the world. 3. The patron saint of the mediocre.

POET: 1. A person born with the instinct to poverty. 2. One whose ideas of the beautiful and the sublime get him in jail or Potter's Field. 3.

The patron saint of landlords. 4. A worthless, s.h.i.+ftless chap whose songs adorn the libraries of fat shopkeepers and paunchy Philistines one hundred years after the chap has died of malnutrition. 5. A dope-fiend.

POETRY: 1. A subst.i.tute for the impossible. 2. The bill and coo of s.e.x.

PLATONIC LOVE: The only kind that is blind. It never knows where it is going to fetch up.

PLANET: A planet is a large body of matter entirely surrounded by a void, as distinguished from a clergyman, who is a large void entirely surrounded by matter.

PLAY: A wise method of Nature which prevents one's nerves from setting on the outside of his Stein-Bloch.

POCKET: The seat of the human soul.

POLICE: Similia similibus.

POLICY: Leaving a few things unsaid.

POLITENESS: 1. The screen of language; the irony of civility; a fis.h.i.+ng-rod. 2. A subst.i.tute for war. 3. To wipe your feet carefully on the common doormat before letting yourself in another's premises with a skeleton key. 4. Caliban in a boiled s.h.i.+rt, tuxedo and spats.

(Politeness in the animal world is known after eating only; in the human world it is known both before and after eating, and, in a certain restricted circle, during eating.)

PRAYER: A supplication intended for the person who prays. Only very dull people doubt its efficacy.

PRIG: A person with more money than he needs.

PREACHER: 1. Mendicancy in a celluloid collar. 2. A man who advises others concerning things about which he knows nothing. 3. Any man who lives on six hundred dollars a year and only works orally. 4. (Now obsolete) One who makes pastoral calls, frightens the young, astonishes the old, bothers the busy, and serves disappointed females as vicarious lover, father, friend, and personal representative of Deity.

PRACTICAL POLITICS: The glad hand, and a swift kick in the pants.

PRINCIPLE: 1. Bait. 2. A formula for doing a thing that, unformulated, would land the doer in jail. (Must not be confused with the word _princ.i.p.al_. Both words are used correctly in the following sentence: One may live one's life without principle, but not without princ.i.p.al.

Or, again, Principle is sometimes princ.i.p.al; but princ.i.p.al has no principle. Or, The princ.i.p.al was never paid on principle.)

PROSECUTOR: 1. One who abets a crime after it has or has not been committed. 2. An oratorical censor that precedes the coming of the hangman. 3. A pumice-stone that gives to the Statue of Justice a cleanly, Christian look. 4. A nose that can sniff the gallows, long before the wood is cut for it in the forest.

POSTPONEMENT: The father of failure.