Beggar: A robber who has lost his nerve – a bandit with a streak of yellow in his ego.
Biddle: The act of introducing a prizefight in a Sunday School.
Billysunday: 1. A theological jumping-jack, jerked by financial strings. 2. Any one with a pious emotional jag. 3. Hypnosis at so much per. 4. A person intent on saving his soul by religious rigmarole at the expense of reason. 5. To paddle away to Paradise in an orthodox canoe, and feel happy in the thought that most of the folks on the Big Ship are going to Hell.
Bloomingdale: A condition of mind.
Bastard: Any man who doubts his own immaculate conception.
Bean: A dynamic spheroid, combustible under certain conditions.
Blaberino: Any person who tells a person something a person says about him, which puts fishbones in the throat and brickbats in the Ostermoor of the person told.
Booty: 1. Whatever belongs to somebody that really belongs to somebody else, or whatever belongs to somebody else that really belongs to you or ought to belong to you if it did not belong to a third party – hence, anything at all. 2. Property in a transitional stage.
Baptism: Hydrocephalic abracadabra.
Bard: Anciently a poet; now a Poet-Laureate.
Boredom: 1. The essential nature of monogamy. 2. A period or rest between I Did and I Will. 3. A state of divine revelation wherein for a single moment we are carried by the giant of Eternal Inutility to the abysms and summits of the perpetual Nix. (The word boredom comes from Bore, a tired son of Noah. After the subsidence of the waters, Bore wandered about the earth, yawning and gaping and stretching, for at that time malaria oozed from many stagnant pools. Finally, absolutely exhausted, Bore, being afraid to be down on the damp and slimy soil, rested on the seventh day on his own bean, hence boredom.)
Bughouse: 1. A condition of mind (See Boston) 2. The place where a person without funds is sent under certain conditions.
Business: Looking a payroll in the eye and kiting checks. 2. A method of reducing a landlady to her lowest terms.
Businessman: One who gets the business and completes the transaction – all the rest are clerks and laborers.
Butler: 1. A Person or Thing that has charge of the servants in a house belonging to another Person or Thing. 2. A tyrant without ears, eyes, organs, dimensions, passions.
Brain: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to fertilize ideas.
Bohemia: A good place in which to camp, but a very poor place in which to settle down.
Bread: A foodstuff which the rich occasionally give to the poor as a substitute for cake.
CANNIBAL: 1. The conceiver and first practitioner of the eucharistic rite. 2. A place where a missionary may have a hell of a time. 3. A Pierrot whose pranks are side-splitting. 4. One who appreciates his fellow-being at his true worth. 5. The most subtle of living ironists. 6. Any one who takes his brother man at his physical valuation.
Carelessness: 1. To have an eye on Eternity, wherein nothing matters. 2. To do a thing in the manner of a god who throws dice for the birth or death of a universe. 3. To perform an act wisely, but not too well.
Courtesy: 1. The court clothes of any two-legged predatory animal. 2. The oil that makes a juggernaut noiseless.
Chums: A condition of sophomorish propinquity that precedes a feud. (See furse and vendetta.) A state of chumminess between persons of opposite sex and suitable ages is more or less in the line of Nature. But that can't-get-along-without-you feeling between persons of the same sex is a form of hate and means that some third party is going to be beaned.
Circumstance: 1. The fresh banana-peel just around the corner. 2. Ex-post-facto knowledge of a series of incidents, episodes and laws which, had we known before doing something that we should not have done anyhow, we would have done otherwise, in the same way, or not at all. 3. The Shadowy Iago that follows us up and down life's promenades. 4. Man Friday to Chance.
Cerebellum: 1. The knapsack of Intelligence. 2. The pons asinorum between the mind and the cabeza. 3. A place whence, in democracies, politicians draw their strength, and in monarchies where the masses manufacture bombs and guillotines. E. g., "Now suppose," began Professor Sapnoodle, "that a tiny elevator ran up the spine; we should then call the cerebellum the ceiling of the basement."
Charity: 1. A thing that begins at home, and usually stays there. 2. Bracing up Ralph Waldo Emerson's reputation by attributing to him literary mousetraps which he should have made, but didn't. (See Cheese.)
Children: Exquisite caskets of flesh that hold the scrolls of all our deeds.
Chauffeur: The power behind the thrown.
Cheek: 1. A drip-pan for tears. 2. Anciently, a part of the face; latterly, among women, the subsoil of rouge. 3. The principal asset of Ex-President Bombastes Furioso.
Chef: The Messiah of gluttons; a Borgia of the scullery; one who crochets sweetbreads instead of cooking them.
Chalk: A deposit found at the top, bottom and middle and in the space between the bottom and middle and between the middle and top of American literature. (Chalk-line, used generally in the phrase, "to walk a chalk-line"; E. g., the shortest way to reach the poor-house is to walk the chalk-line of probity).
Clique: Friendship gone to seed.
Committee: A thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.
Christian: 1. One of a sect that despises and rejects the race from which its founder sprang. 2. A person who thinks he believes in a certain creed that he does not believe in, and thus is pied mentally, morally and arithmetically. 3. A man who keeps one day in the week holy and raises hell with folks and fauna the other six – sometimes.
Church: A place where the Anointed of the Lord palm themselves off on one another. 2. A hall of echoes. 3. A counterpane for the dead. 4. An edifice wherein inspired fogyism gets its final degree.
Chicago Tongue: A lengthening of the unruly member to a hammer-like proportion.
Conscience: 1. The muzzle of the will. 2. The Pecksniffian mask of the fundamental Bill Sykes. 3. The aspiration of Rosinante to be Pegasus.
Church Unity: Joining my church.
Cigarettist: One who is late every morning and fresh every evening.
City: 1. Any place where men have builded a jail, a bagnio, a gallows, a morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon, and laid out a cemetery – hence a center of life. 2. A herding region; any part of the earth where ignorance and stupidity integrate, agglomerate and breed.
Civilization: A device for increasing human ills; a machine for the perpetuation of the weak; an ingenious contraption for spreading disease and hunger. (See war, harlot, politician, liar, Teddy, Sulzer, Murphy, hypocrisy, newspaper, forger, jail, policemen, lawyer, walking delegate, capitalist, poverty, clergyman.) E. g., "Do you believe in civilization?" "Yep." From The Confessions of Herr Krupp.
Commonsense: The ability to detect values – to know a big thing from a little one. (I'd rather possess Commonsense than to have six degrees from Oxford. —Fingy Conners' Confessions.)
Clock: 1. A telltale; a gossip; a blab. 2. A chink through which the Greta Secret leaks. 3. The Big Ben of eternity.
Coffin: