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This was last modified 22 July 2007
n. An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, jugum, we owe
one of the most illuminating words in our language — a word that
defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy.
A thousand apologies for withholding it.
X in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility
to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will
doubtless last as long as the language. X is the sacred symbol of ten
dollars, and in such words as Xmas, Xn, etc., stands for Christ, not,
as is popular supposed, because it represents a cross, but because the
corresponding letter in the Greek alphabet is the initial of his name
— Xristos. If it represented a cross it would stand for St.
Andrew, who “testified” upon one of that shape. In the algebra of
psychology x stands for Woman’s mind. Words beginning with X are
Grecian and will not be defined in this standard English dictionary.
n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of
governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to
him it should be said that he did not want to.
They took away his vote and gave instead
The right, when he had earned, to eat his bread.
In vain — he clamors for his “boss,” pour soul,
To come again and part him from his roll.
n. A symbol for sin for every devil to rebuke. That
Wall Street is a den of thieves is a belief that serves every
unsuccessful thief in place of a hope in Heaven. Even the great and
good Andrew Carnegie has made his profession of faith in the matter.
Carnegie the dauntless has uttered his call
To battle: “The brokers are parasites all!”
Carnegie, Carnegie, you’ll never prevail;
Keep the wind of your slogan to belly your sail,
Go back to your isle of perpetual brume,
Silence your pibroch, doff tartan and plume:
Ben Lomond is calling his son from the fray —
Fly, fly from the region of Wall Street away!
While still you’re possessed of a single baubee
(I wish it were pledged to endowment of me)
’Twere wise to retreat from the wars of finance
Lest its value decline ere your credit advance.
For a man ’twixt a king of finance and the sea,
Carnegie, Carnegie, your tongue is too free!
n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing
political condition is a period of international amity. The student
of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly
boast himself inaccessible to the light. “In time of peace prepare
for war” has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means,
not merely that all things earthly have an end — that change is the
one immutable and eternal law — but that the soil of peace is thickly
sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination
and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his “stately pleasure
dome” — when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in
Xanadu — that he
heard from afar
Ancestral voices prophesying war.
One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of
men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us
have a little less of “hands across the sea,” and a little more of
that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to
come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide
the night.
n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of
conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have
inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal
ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up official weather
bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments
are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be —
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he’d preferred to the advantages of truth.
He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote —
For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:
“Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow.”
An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a
rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by
many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility
acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the
postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion,
deny the virtue and declare that such as creation’s dawn beheld,
it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all
beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from
Greeland’s spicy mountains to India’s moral strand. The popular
name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind.
The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the
American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be
taught not to talk.
