Part 9 (1/2)

RELIGION: Philosophy touched with emotion.

RAILROADS: The most important factor for progress and enlightenment in the world today.

RENUNCIATION: The act of giving up your seat in a street-car to a pretty woman, and then purposely stepping on an old man's toes.

REFORMER: 1. One who causes the rich to band themselves against the poor. 2. One who educates the people to appreciate the things they need.

REGION: A specific, definite s.p.a.ce, as distinguished from any other specific, definite s.p.a.ce; as, East Aurora, Barren Island, Kalamazoo, Sea Grit, Beverly.

REPARTEE: Any remark which is so clever that it makes the listener wish he had said it himself.

RESIGNATION: 1. A truce with ourselves in order to give us time to bury our living. 2. Pride walling itself up. 3. To keep shop without a show-window. 4. To go to sleep in the lap of the inevitable. 5. A covered walk to the interior of ourselves; a subway to some other form of trespa.s.s; a peephole into the enemy's fortress. 6. To play possum when one hears the footfall of Fate on the stairs.

REPUTATION: A bubble which a man bursts when he tries to blow it for himself.

RESURRECTION: The hypothetical New-Year's Day in the calendar of the dead.

REMORSE: That feeling which we all have when the thing fails to work, and the world knows it. The form that failure takes when it has made a grab and got nothing.

RESPECTABILITY: The d.i.c.key on the bosom of civilization.

ROMANCE: Where the hero begins by deceiving himself and ends by deceiving others.

RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: 1. Hate that scorches like h.e.l.l, but which the possessor thinks proves he is right. 2. Your own wrath as opposed to the shocking bad temper of others.

RIGHTEOUSNESS: 1. Only a form of commonsense. 2. Wise expediency.

REVIVAL: Religion with a vaudeville attachment.

ROOSEVELT (THEODORE): A harangue-outang.

RUINS: 1. The hope of the ancient yesterday. 2. Absolute proof that the world of dreams, like the planet earth, is round. (Ruins are chiefly notable for the number of enlightened liars, called archeologists, they produce.)

SACRILEGE: 1. Any impolite act in the presence of a Humbug. 2. To shock the sensibilities of a n.o.body. 3. To kill a mystical Mule or swap jokes in public with a Ghost.

SACRED SOIL: That which is well tilled.

SAINT: 1. Generally speaking, a person who retires into the wilderness of the spirit in order to coddle a ruling weakness. 2. To become polite toward G.o.d and His universe. 3. A steeplejack on miraged minarets.

SAINTs.h.i.+P: The exclusive possession of those who have either worn out or never had the capacity to sin.

SANITY: The ability to do team-work.

SALOON: The poor man's club; run with intent to make the poor man poorer.

SAVAGES: Men who like to go to war.

SANATORIUM: The place where a man is sent who has money, as opposed to ”Bughouse,” meaning the place where a man is sent who has no bank-balance.

SATIRIST: 1. A taxidermist of the Past, Present and Future; one who disembowels, stuffs and mounts all the G.o.ds, living and dead; one who fills up with straw and sawdust all illusions. 2. An esoteric mimic. 3.