The In-Your-Face Dictionary:
Defining Things As They Really Are

by Everhart Sraem

Send your feedback to Sraem@InYourFaceDictionary.com

A

‘A’ student, n. 1. someone ill-prepared for survival in the real world. See education, scholar.

abnormal, adj. 1. (psychiatry) the psychiatrist’s catchall for individuals or behaviors or things in general that scare him.

abstract art, n. 1. the refuge of impatient artists who think they can make a killing without learning the fundamentals of art.

absurdity, n. 1. a statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion. [Ambrose Bierce]

academia, n. 1. the mirror world of scholars reflecting upon scholars reflecting upon scholars reflecting upon scholars reflecting upon scholars reflecting upon scholars…

academy award, n. 1. an award generally given to those movies (and the actors in them) that the vast majority of people don’t want to see.

accept, v. 1. (psychology) the grand aspiration of classical psychotherapy: to make the patient stop striving to change himself, his life, and the world around him, but rather to just be content with the way things are. This of course is a fine philosophy if you happen to be a domestic animal. See well-adjusted.

accident, n. 1. damaging yourself in such a way as to make it appear to others (and often to yourself as well) that you were damaged by something or somebody else. 2. a shrewd way of getting out of doing something you don’t want to do. 3. a means that professional victims use to make a very good living through suing.

accountant, n. 1. a priest initiated into the mystical art of making numbers sing and dance.

accounting, n. 1. a magical practice of such power that, with the right incantations and mystic numbers inscribed on paper, financial disasters can be transformed into triumphs – indeed, the very face of reality can be changed. See balance sheet.

achievement, n. 1. the key ingredient that was left out of self-esteem.

activity, n. 1. that flurry of motion that bureaucrats engage in instead of producing anything.

ADD, n. 1. (Attention Deficit Disorder) a made-up mental disease invented by psychiatrists, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, to give children powerful, addictive mind-altering drugs in order to induce them to stop acting like children. This fabricated disease is apparently so contagious that now even adults are catching it.

addictive, adj. 1. productive of repeat business. See drug maintenance.

additive, n. 1. those multifarious and mysterious substances added to simple food to make it look better, taste better, last longer, etc., and generally improve upon God’s creation. See ingredients.

ADHD, n. 1. (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) another designer mental diagnosis more serious than ADD, because it indicates that the little monster not only won't pay attention to what the well-meaning psychiatrist, teacher, parent, etc. is trying to tell him, but he's also hard to catch. Hence the drugs: They slow him down enough so he can be caught and made to listen. See Eight Easy Steps for Creating a Mental Disease.

admiration, n. 1. our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves. [Ambrose Bierce]

adult, n. 1. a child who is bigger, moves slower, and gets away with more. 2. Adults are obsolete children. [Dr. Seuss] 3. When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay. [Brian Aldiss]

advertiser, n. 1. a stuff promoter.

advertising, n. 1. the art of making people acquire things they don’t really want or need.

advice, n. 1. a commodity purveyed in human commerce that is generally free, and worth every cent.

affect, n. 1. (psychiatry) the psychiatrist’s word for emotion. It is his way of hiding the fact that he is just talking about emotion and doesn’t know any more about it than you do – or probably less, because psychiatrists don't generally like emotion.

after life, the, n. 1. pretty much the same as the before life and the life before that.

age, n. 1. a measure of how many times a person or a thing has gone around the sun.

air, n. 1. a plentiful substance on Planet Earth, except in metropolitan areas.

alliance, n. 1. in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third. [Ambrose Bierce]

Almighty Buck, The, n. 1. the god of capitalism.

alone, adj. 1. in bad company. [Ambrose Bierce]

altruism, n. 1. self-interest masquerading as selflessness. 2. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism. [Ayn Rand]

American Dream, n. 1. that idea that any person can come to the United States with nothing and can rise as high as their vision and industry will allow. Many individuals still flock to the U.S. to get away from third world or socialistic economies and try their hand at the American Dream. However, some caring individuals consider that the American Dream is too heartless. They believe that a person should be allowed to reap all the rewards of clever planning and hard work without doing any.

amusement, n. 1. the measure of a person. You can tell what kind you’re dealing with by what amuses them.

Angelino, n. 1. a resident of Los Angeles. Someone with a lower need for reality and oxygen than other people.

annual report, n. 1. (business) a report furnished yearly by a corporation to explain how the pathetic ineptitude of management is actually masterful competence. See accounting.

answer, n. 1. the end of questioning.

anti-tobacco ads, n. 1. a classic example of public money spent poorly.

apartment, n. 1. a private dwelling without the privacy.

apathy, n. 1. a serious, widespread affliction in America today that nobody seems to care very much about.

apply, v. t. 1. the usual failure point of theoreticians and idealists.

Archbishop, n. 1. a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ. [H.L. Mencken]

arms race, the, n. 1. a strange sort of race indeed.

arrest, v. t. 1. to transfer a troublemaker from the outside world, where he may do harm to your person, to a secure place, where he will certainly do harm to your pocketbook. See prison.

art critic, n. 1. one who hates art and is doing everything in his power to stop it. 2. one who cannot enjoy art and who is seeking vengeance on those who can.

art, visual, n. 1. an art form consisting mainly of paintings or sculptures. Traditional artists sought to please the viewer with beautiful, noble, thought-provoking images; the contemporary artist seeks to bum him out with dark, ugly, degrading, meaningless images.

artist, n. 1. an individual fired with the godlike ambition to fashion a better future for mankind and to turn the mirror of truth on his time – but not if he wants to feed his family. 2. (psychology) a mentally-ill individual who has sublimated his mental disease into works of art. 3. a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. [George Santayana]

assassination, n. 1. the last resort of special interests when bribes and persuasion have not accomplished the desired result.

assertiveness training, n. 1. (psychobabble) training someone to overcome shyness by becoming obnoxious.

atomic bomb, n. 1. an expression of mankind’s natural impulse to commit suicide.

author, n. 1. a dreamer who bares his soul to the world and hopes that he doesn’t get prosecuted for indecent exposure.

authority, n. 1. that quality of self-assertion in a person or field that is needed in inverse proportion to actual knowledge, competence, or demonstrated right to lead. See Law of Authority. 2. a self-nominated expert in a field. 3. an organization consisting of self-nominated experts in a field. See professional society, orthodox medicine, orthodox science, psychology. 4. a charlatan; one who substitutes mouth for mastery. 5. a nay-sayer; one who cannot do something and works tirelessly to convince you that it cannot be done.

automaton, n. 1. (psychiatry) a push-button machine that psychiatrists are trying to turn everyone into in order to prove their theories about the stimulus-response nature of human beings. See robot.

automobile, n. 1. a vehicle powered by the decayed remains of extinct creatures. See oil.

automobile company, n. 1. a manufacturing concern whose central mission is to burn efficient fuels as inefficiently as possible.

autumn, n. 1. one of the two times in the year when it gets neither too cold nor too hot. Preferred by those who don’t like either summer or winter. Disliked by those who prefer either winter or summer. See fall.

average man, n. 1. a statistical fantasy idealized by the anti-social sciences. See normal man.

B

baby, n. 1. a bonified person who just hasn’t yet learned to speak, walk, or run for Congress.

bagel, n. 1. a type of bread geometrically engineered to have as much crust as possible. 2. an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis. [Beatrice & Ira Freeman]

bailout, n. 1. (also TARP) criminals regulating criminals for the benefit of criminals.

balance sheet, n. 1. (business) a magical artifact purported to expose the inner mysteries of a corporation.

barbecue, n. 1. a device on which modern pioneers cook their latest kill.

baseball, n. 1. the American pastime comprised of 1/4 competition and 3/4 computation.

battle, n. 1. a method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue. [Ambrose Bierce]

bean counter, n. 1. (business) an accountant-type in an organization who allocates resources as though they were beans. It never occurs to such persons that all beans are not alike.

beer, n. 1. living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. [Benjamin Franklin]

beggars, n. 1. Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them. [Friedrich Nietzsche] See bum.

begging, n. 1. street corner extortion.

behavior, n. 1. (psychology) human action viewed only as reaction.

behavior modification, n. 1. (psychology) an attempt to change how a person acts without changing how a person thinks.

behaviorism, n. 1. a branch of psychology that concerns itself primarily with the study of rats. The behaviorists declare that the mind does not exist – only behavior. This is apparently a conclusion they reached after examining rats (or perhaps themselves).

beheading, n. 1.a fast, eloquent, effectual method of changing someone’s point of view. See decapitation.

belt tightening, n. 1. (business) what big companies do in times of recession to ensure their market share will shrink. See emergency.

Bill of Rights, n. 1. the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, attached to the Constitution by the founding fathers to protect the people from the voracity and capriciousness of all governments. It has taken the best legal minds of thirteen generations to figure out ways around these first ten amendments – and all for the greater good of the country, of course. See national security, Patriot Act.

biology, n. 1. the study of life that now focuses on molecules, cells, organisms, and populations, but does not study life anymore.

blame, n. 1. a smoke screen we throw up to prevent others from finding out what we really did. See righteous indignation.

body, n. 1. something you possess or use that you have been brainwashed into believing you are. 2. a gold mine for doctors, insurance salesmen, health clubs, etc. 3. an object of worship for modern man.

body building, n. 1. one of the sacraments practiced in the worship of the Great God of Body.

brain, n. 1. a greatly overrated organ of the body. See lie, the big. 2. a heavy object in the head whose primary function is to keep the head from blowing away.

brainstorming, n. 1. a method of shared problem-solving designed to get a group to generate as many creative ideas as possible, which will then be distilled into a plan of action for the group. This is based on the well-established principle that thinking is a democratic process and that a committee is smarter than an individual.

brainwashed, n. 1. referring to someone who believes that the fantasy created by the mass media is real. See newspaper, idiot.

brainwashing, n. 1. (also inculcation) the process of surrounding a person with one version of reality to such an extent that he is incapable of seeing or conceiving any other reality. In our day and age, this version of reality that we have all been surrounded with is called materialism. See brainwashed.

bum, n. 1. a homeless person with dignity.

bureaucracy, n. 1. where lots of bodies sit and act very busy, but where little actual work gets done, because bodies, left to their own devices, are not interested in work. See activity, Law of Bureaucracy, The. 2. a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. [Honore de Balzac]

bureaucrat, n. 1. a public or corporate employee who considers it his highest calling to ensure that the forms are all filled out correctly.

bureaucrat's motto, the, n. 1. when in doubt, fill out a form.

burial, n. 1. a solemn occasion when the body of a departed loved one is returned to the dust from which it came – but thanks to the miracles of modern undertaking, very, very slowly – thus cheating the local flora of much needed nutrients.

burning at the stake, n. 1. an enlightened medieval method of changing people’s points of view. See Inquisition.

C

capitalism, n. 1. an economic system that thrives on scarcity – scarce land, scarce commodities, scarce ideas, scarce competence. Where there is insufficient scarcity, the capitalist manufactures or legislates some.

cat, n. 1. the real power behind the American family unit.

catharsis, n. 1. (psychology) the hypothesis that pent-up emotions or urges can be dissipated by acting them out or fantasizing about them. For example, the psychotherapist urges a patient to work out his anger by punching a pillow. This approach is about as effective as scratching a poison oak rash.

cause, n. 1. the source or emanation point for action, which has become an increasingly unpopular position to occupy in modern society. The man who causes things becomes a target for bleeding hearts and lawyers. It is far more popular to be an effect, to be a billiard ball on the pool table of life.

celebrity, n. 1. someone who makes a lot of money and is driven around in a limousine. 2. a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. [Fred Allen]

cell phone, n. 1. an electronic device whose purported purpose is to provide phone communication from remote locations. Its actual purpose is to sterilize the human race, a fact which has generally escaped notice, because the cell phone also turns the brain into a mass of black pudding.

cemetery, n. 1. a well-tended, aesthetic place where bodies are retired from service.

censorship, n. 1. telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. [Mark Twain]

Central Bank, n. 1. a mechanism for creating inflations, recessions, panics, and total economic collapses at will. See Federal Reserve.

challenged, adj. 1. ( psychobabble) impaired; the circumlocution that blood-coagulation-challenged hearts use to describe individuals with disabilities. 2. The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to encourage in others. [Oscar Wilde]

charity, n. 1. an often dedicated and generous effort to treat symptoms rather than causes. Giving a person a fish when he needs a fishing rod.

chemotherapy, n. 1. (medicine) a brutal assault on the already-weakened body of a cancer victim that kills cancerous cells by killing living cells as well. In the more extreme treatments, such as for leukemia, it only works because of the phenomenal ability of modern hospitalization techniques to keep a patient alive even when the treatment is killing him.

child labor laws, n. 1. laws initially passed to curb the abuses against children in the early factories of the industrial revolution, now chiefly used to delay a child’s entry into the workplace – and thus keeping the workforce artificially low and permanently stunting the child’s willingness to work.

child psychology, n. 1.that branch of psychology that transforms normal children into neurotics or psychotics, so that there will be plenty of follow-up business.

church, n. 1. the last bastion of the spirit, where a few beleaguered souls fight a losing battle against the modern gods of Stuff, Youth, and the Almighty Buck.

CIA, n. 1. a spy organization of the U.S. government whose charter is to cause foreign wars and increase the distrust of the United States abroad.

citation, n. 1. ticket; the device used by little Napoleans to lord it over people they secretly suspect are better than they are.

city life, n. 1. millions of people being lonely together. [Henry David Thoreau]

civil lawyer, n. 1. one who makes money off other peoples’ disputes. Where these disputes are insufficiently inflammatory, the civil lawyer fans the flames.

clairvoyance, n. 1. stepping out of the body to have a look around. 2. an inexpensive and extremely mobile video monitoring device. 3. a particularly nefarious form of cheating. See out of body experience, precognition.

classic, n. 1. a book which people praise and don’t read. [Mark Twain]

cliff, n. 1. the shortest route down a mountain.

clock, n. 1. an invention that creates time.

cocktail party, n. 1. a gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host. [Fred Allen]

coincidence, n. 1. when you bring into juxtaposition two or more disrelated persons, places, or things, and then forget that you had anything to do with it.

collaborative learning, n. 1. (education) the system of modern group education based on the premise that children whose heads have been filled with popular music, television, and schoolyard gossip will evolve knowledge and wisdom if they put their heads together. See cooperative learning, group learning.

collectivism, n. 1. the subordination of the individual to the group. All governments gravitate toward collectivism, because all politicians are by nature parasites who realize their personal ambitions by sucking blood out of the populace.

college degree, n. 1. a holy artifact that blesses the individual with the gift of employability.

comfort, n. 1. a reward earned by the industrious, which only their deadbeat children have time to enjoy. See luxury, nest egg.

committee, n. 1. a séance convened to bless a plan of action by a legislator or business executive, who is too insecure to take responsibility for the plan himself.

common knowledge, n. 1. something that is definitely not true. See truism, common sense, common wisdom.

common people, n. 1. humanoids hyped as heroes.

common sense, n. 1. the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. [Albert Einstein]

common wisdom, n. 1. that wisdom that is pretty damn stupid. See truism, common sense, common knowledge.

communication, n. 1. the interchange of information between two or more people through some physical medium, such as the spoken word, sign language, the written word, or bullets.

commute, n. 1. a ritualistic dance conducted twice daily on the freeways of America for the entertainment of migrating geese sailing overhead.

complexity of the mind, n. 1. the idea that the human mind is too complex to be understood, an idea which was developed and promoted by psychologists to justify their inability to do anything about it. See I.Q., law of the incurability of conditions. The psychiatrist makes a more decisive assault on the complexity of the mind: He drugs the patient, electric shocks him, cuts up his brain, etc., thus proving that something can be done about the mind: It can be obliterated.

compromise, n. 1. to find a middle ground that no one is happy with.

computer, n. 1. an electronic device that provides answers very, very fast. Unfortunately, it takes judgment to ascertain if the answer is right, wrong, important, unimportant, relevant, or irrelevant, and judgment is a commodity that is no more plentiful today than it ever was. See statistics.

confession, n. 1. when you tell just enough about some wrongdoing you have committed to prevent another from finding out the whole truth.

conflicted, adj. 1. (psychobabble) the choice to be confused and indecisive in the face of a personal problem instead of just solving it.

conscience, n. 1. a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. [H. L. Mencken]

conservative, n. 1. a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. [Ambrose Bierce] 2. one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead. [Leo Rosten]

Consitution of the United States of America, n. 1. an outmoded and naive document drafted by impulsive dreamers over 200 years ago, which fortunately is little observed today in the executive, legislative, and legal branches of the government. It has been largely replaced by the more trendy philosophies of "Wing it!" and "Gimme!".

constructivism, n. 1. (education) the theory that knowledge is built up through the process of evaluating and modifying existing knowledge based on new experience. In the public schools this theory has been translated into a de-emphasis on a standard curriculum such as the 3 R’s in favor of cooperative learning, where the students essentially teach each other. The student may emerge from this process knowing very little of history, science, literature, art, etc. and unable to read, write, and perform the other skills required by the real world, but he is well-prepared to evaluate and modify existing knowledge if any ever comes his way. See Outcome-Based Education. HOTS.

consult, v. t. 1. to seek another’s approval of a course already decided on. [Ambrose Bierce]

contentment, n. 1. the primary aim of homo sapiens and other domestic animals. See accept, happiness.

control, n. 1. a vital requisite for doing anything, which has fallen into disrepute of late. Children should not be controlled, employees should not be controlled, criminals should not be controlled, one’s behavior should not be controlled, one’s mind should not be controlled – all of which explains why our world has been spinning completely out of control. See facilitation.

conviction, n. 1. truth backed up by a bayonet. 2. a rock-solid certainty about something that is not true. 3. the certainty you attain after having your brain fried by a psychiatrist or your behavior modified by a behaviorist. 4. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

cooperative learning, n. 1. (also group learning, collaborative learning) one of the three primary components of Outcome-Based Education, where two to five children are grouped in a classroom in order to do everything as a team. The teachers do not teach; they facilitate. The students do not study; they practice higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). The fast team members learn to help the slower team members and everyone on the team receives the same grade. Reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, etc. are of course irrelevant skills.

copyright, n. 1. the claim a writer, artist, composer, or programmer stakes on mental real estate in order to charge people rent for using it.

corporate scandal, n. 1. survival of the fittest as applied to the workplace; weeding out the clumsy corporate executives from the adroit ones too clever to be caught.

corporation, n. 1. an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. [Ambrose Bierce]

correctional facility, n. 1. an institution that corrects the errors that caused a criminal to land in jail, so that he can be a more efficient criminal and better avoid being apprehended next time. See prison.

counselor, n. 1. one who seeks to advise others, because he has failed so miserably to advise himself.

creation, n. 1. putting something there that wasn't there before, an action that is outlawed in the physical universe and enforced by psychiatrists and critics.

creativity, n. 1. your native ability to make new, useful, or beautiful things, which the public school system considers a distraction –and the workplace confirms.

Creator, The, n. 1. a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh. [H.L. Mencken] See God.

credit card, n. 1. a piece of plastic with magical properties that charm you into believing you have a great deal more money than you actually have. 2. a piece of plastic that allows you to afford things that you cannot afford.

crime, n. 1. a lot of work for a small return.

critic, n. 1. someone who trashes the creations of others by measuring them against some trash in his mind. 2. a failed artist seeking revenge. 3. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. [Mel Brooks]

cult, n. 1. a religion with no political power. [Tom Wolfe]

cure, n. 1. a treatment that eliminates a physical or mental disease, generally frowned on by doctors, psychiatrists, drug companies, hospitals, and the like, because it cuts into business. 2. (psychiatry and psychotherapy) that miraculous upturn in mental health occasioned by the patient running out of money.

curiosity, n. 1. a potentially deadly disorder, notorious for its detrimental effect on cats, the cure of which is public education.

curse, n. 1. one of religion’s most valuable contributions to civilization; a magical incantation that makes pain or frustration more bearable.

custom, n. 1.that collection of agreements embraced by a people regarding what is courteous or correct behavior. As time goes by, these agreements coalesce into the moral and legal codes of that people. Reformers and revolutionaries instinctively seek to subvert, pervert, or convert custom (and its embodiment in the courts, the churches, and the schools), because they recognize it as the primary barrier to their plans. This impulse to destroy custom is the primary driving force behind psychology and psychiatry in the 20th and 21st centuries.

cynic, n. 1. a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. [Ambrose Bierce]

D

Dark Ages, The, n. 1. (476AD - ) a period of time when men are kept illiterate and ignorant, so that they can be more easily controlled.

dawn, n. the time when men of reason go to bed. [Ambrose Bierce]

day, n. those insignificant units of time by which we measure our existence, which, by some alchemy, turn into years before we even notice their departure.

dead, n. out of commission.

decapitation, n. a decisive way to resolve a disagreement.

deceit, n. the winning attitude, broadly rewarded by society.

Defense Department, n. originally the War Department, the name held for 180 years, but was changed to Defense in 1949 in order to engage in more wars.

deficit, n. when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it. [Richard Lamm]

deliberation, n. the act of examining one’s bread to determine which side it is buttered on. [Ambrose Bierce]

demagogue, n. 1. one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. [H. L. Mencken] 2. The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he. [Karl Kraus]

democracy, n. the tyranny of the majority over the minority. See dictatorship.

Democratic Party, n. the handout party. The party that shows it cares for underdogs by throwing your money at them.

denial, n. (psychobabble) when other people think you are not putting sufficient attention on what they consider important.

dentist, n. a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket. [Ambrose Bierce]

depression, n. 1. a rational, open-eyed reaction to the troubled world we live in.

destiny, n. 1. a tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure. [Ambrose Bierce]

diagnosis, n. 1. a physician’s forecast of disease by the patient’s pulse and purse. [Ambrose Bierce]

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, n. 1. (DSM) The psychiatric “Bible” for diagnosing mental diseases (called disorders). It employs an easy-to-use checklist system to determine which mental diseases a person has. It is so easy to use even a child could make a diagnosis and prescribe a drug. Some critics have expressed concern that it is too simplistic, relies on subjective judgments rather than objective measures, labels normal human variations as disease, and almost always results in the administration of powerful, addictive mind-altering drugs. However, critics generally concede that the checklist approach is a considerable improvement over the “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” approach that was used previously.

dictatorship, n. 1. the tyranny of the minority over the majority. See democracy.

dilettante, n. 1. a tourist on the road of life.

diplomacy, n. 1. the patriotic act of lying for one’s country. [Ambrose Bierce]

dirt, n. 1. a black or brown semi-organic material nearly extinct in urban areas, but which, when it does break through the concrete or asphalt, immediately sprouts pieces of paper, bottles, cigarette wrappers, and other insignia of civilization.

disabled, adj. 1. referring to someone who is being rewarded for being handicapped. See disabled child, disabled parking, challenged.

disabled child, n. 1. (education) the cash cow of the public school system. Every time a public school labels a child with a physical or mental disability, it gets a generous handout from the government. In the public interest, psychiatrists have invented lots of cool new mental diseases like stuttering, reading disorder, ADHD, and pervasive running nose. In the not too distant future, every child will be labeled mentally ill and teachers will no longer be needed – only therapists.

disabled parking, n. 1. the stringently-enforced allocation of the choicest parking spots to no one.

disease, n. 1. a highly-valued commodity to the medical and psychiatric professions, because insurance companies don’t pay for health; they pay for diseases. See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Disneyland, n. 1. an oasis of reality in the midst of the fantasy land of Southern California.

disorder, mental, n. 1. (psychiatry) a condition where the psychiatrist hallucinates that the patient’s brain is not working properly. 2. a normal human problem recast as a disease of the brain in order to justify the administration of drugs and the billing of insurance companies.

distance, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe that prevents an object from simply being willed or translated from one place to another, thus necessitating transportation.

distraction, n. 1. a method used by the world at large to try to keep productive people from finishing.

divorce, n. 1. the modern way to be promiscuous.

doctor, n. 1. a legal drug pusher. 2. the kind of mechanic who makes 6 figures instead of 5 and takes money from people whether he can fix the vehicle or not. 3. Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.[Voltaire]

dog, n. 1. a four-legged creature descended from wolves but inferior, because it has lost the wolf’s healthy distrust of mankind.

doubletalk, n. 1. (also doublespeak) the stock and trade of the politician and the authority, otherwise known as “speaking with forked tongue.”

doughnut, n. 1. a shameless scam that turns a normal pastry into two pastries, the doughnut and the hole, and then reaps the undeserved windfall of selling them separately.

downhill, adv. 1. the reward for having struggled all the way uphill.

drama critic, n. 1. a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant. [Wilson Mizner]

drug, n. (also medication) 1. a poison whose side-effects generally exceed the claimed benefits both in number and severity. 2. a mind-suppressant that lowers your consciousness sufficiently to stifle or mask pain, fear, or other unwanted conditions. It is specifically designed to not cure anything, because that would kill repeat business. 3. a chemical substance known to cause irrational, violent, or suicidal thoughts when acquired illegally, but which is perfectly safe if prescribed by a doctor or psychiatrist. 4. Pharmaceutical companies will soon rule the world if we keep letting them believe we are a happy, functional society so long as all the women are on Prozac, all children on Ritalin, and all men on Viagra. [Terri Guillemets]

drug addict, n. 1. one who experiences some combination of physical, emotional, and psychological distress when unable to take coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, or other addictive substance.

drug advertisements, n. 1. the primary reason you seldom hear or read any negative media commentary of drugs. 2. an exercise in drippy sweetness (anti-depressants) or an exercise in torture (cough relievers). If you don’t have a headache when the pain reliever ad starts, you will before it completes.

drug maintenance, n. 1. hooking a person on a drug specifically engineered to treat symptoms rather than causes, so that the person will never be cured and will have to take the drug forever.

drug pusher, n. (also drug dealer) 1. a capitalist who specializes in dispensing drugs, whether illegally or legally.

drug treatment program, n. 1. an expensive program for hooking addicts on new drugs.

DSM-IV, n. 1. The affectionate nickname for the new, groundbreaking fantasy, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.

dualism, n. 1. (philosophy) the traditional and self-evident observation that there is a qualitative difference between life and inanimate matter, between mind and the physical universe – a viewpoint challenged by materialists, who are fearful that somewhere, somehow, something else is going on in the world besides the little balls careening around in their heads.

dust, n. 1. the final monument to all the great civilizations of man.

duty, n. 1. When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. [George Bernard Shaw]

dyslexia, n. 1. a learning disorder that is sometimes physical in origin, but in most cases is caused by the whole-word or look-say method of teaching reading, now dominant in the public schools of America.

E

Earth, n. 1. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? [Henry David Thoreau]

eclectic method, n. 1. ( psychotherapy) what a psychotherapist does when he’s too confused to use a systematic therapeutic approach – unless of course he’s just experimenting on you.

economics, n. 1. a simple subject made complex in order to justify unsound financial policies that politicians undertake for undisclosed reasons.

economist, n. 1. If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. [George Bernard Shaw] 2. an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. [Lawrence J. Peter] 3. The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters. [Jean-Paul Kauffmann]

economy, n. 1. the aggregate of goods and services produced and exchanged within a defined group. Like a good party, the economy is best administered by providing a plentiful supply of chips and beverages, and leaving the guests to entertain themselves.

editor, n. 1. a person employed by a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff and to see that chaff is printed.[Elbert Hubbard]

education, n. 1. the method used by societies to try to prevent their children from coming up with original thoughts. See student. 2. the field that is falling on its face due to its increasing dominance by psychology. 3. the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. [John Maynard Keynes] 4. Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. [Bertrand Russell] 5. I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. [Michel de Montaigne] 6. education consists mainly in what we have unlearned. [Mark Twain] 7. education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything one learned in school. [Albert Einstein] See school, public school.

effort, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe that makes it necessary for life to expend and harness energy in order to survive.

egg, n. 1. the most perfect source of protein, the consumption of which has of course been discouraged by the medical establishment.

Eight Easy Steps for Creating a New Mental Disease, n. 1. To create a new mental disease, such as those in the DSM-IV, follow the following scientific steps:

1) (Optional Step) Observe the person.
2) Make a list of the behaviors the person is exhibiting.
3) Describe those characteristics in an alarming fashion. For example, change the word active to hyperactive.
4) Invent a new mental disease that consists of those alarming characteristics and give it a serious, scientific-sounding name. For example, “Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder”. This makes it sound a lot more alarming than “Kid finds teacher boring” or “Kid has too much energy for teacher” or “Kid would rather play than sit behind a desk.”
5) Label the individual as a patient suffering from the new mental disease.
6) Assert that there is something wrong with the patient's brain causing the new mental disease. (It is not necessary for there to be physical evidence of this assertion. This is covered by Step 8.)
7) Give the patient powerful, addictive mind-altering drugs to treat the brain problem.
8) Discover that prolonged administration of the drugs have now caused brain shrinkage or some other brain abnormality and assert knowingly that it was caused by, or is physical evidence of, the mental disease.

elected official, n. 1. a deadbeat who spends other people’s money and thinks that it is really his money. 2. a master at paying back special interests while arguing conclusively that it is for the public interest. See politician, public servant.

electric shock treatment, (also electroconvulsive therapy or ECT), n. 1. a form of persuasion employed by psychiatrists to help the individual adjust his view of reality. See Inquisition, torture. 2. a technique originally used for slaughtering hogs adapted with excellent therapeutic results to human beings.

electricity, n. 1. a force of nature still unexplained, yet employed with wild abandon by modern man.

electrocution, n. 1. an ill-conceived attempt to use the body as a conduit for the conduction of electricity.

eloquence, n. 1. the art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white. [Ambrose Bierce]

email, n. 1. the modern way to appear busy at work while getting nothing done.

embassy, n. 1. a building or complex owned by a foreign government that serves as a base for spy operations.

emergency, n. 1. (business) a situation requiring quick, heroic action to avert danger. Instinctively the sane individual confronted with a financial emergency in his life increases his output, promotes like crazy, and burns the midnight oil. In the world of big business, however, Monstro, Inc., when confronted by an emergency, reduces its output, cuts back on promotion, and fires people. This is one of the main reasons that it takes so little time for Monstro to turn into Minnow – and then to get eaten.

empowerment, n. (psychobabble) 1. the idea that leaders should place less emphasis on getting the job done and more emphasis on involving those under them in the process. For example, a teacher should be less concerned with turning out educated students and more concerned with letting students take charge of their own education and feel good about themselves. Likewise, a manager should be less concerned with providing good products in a timely fashion to customers and more concerned with building a strong team. See facilitation 2. letting the employees participate in the decision-making process, because you don’t have a clue. 3. getting employee input, then doing what you planned to do all along.

enemy, n. 1. (government) the best antidote for failed policies and uninspiring leadership. Nothing rallies the people behind their leaders like a good enemy. 2. anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on. [Joseph Heller]

enthusiasm, n. 1. (psychiatry) the manic side of a severe and dangerous bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder. Treating this condition is often complicated by the patient’s failure to manifest the depressive side of the condition. In such a case, the psychiatrist must take matters into his own hands, bringing the patient under his benevolent control and treating him with powerful mind-altering drugs as soon as possible. Otherwise the depressive side may never be flushed into the light, leaving the poor patient with the delusion that he is happy.

entrepreneur, n. 1. one who creates a business. If his business plan is sensible, if he produces goods or services that people want – and if he works hard – the business will expand, allowing the entrepreneur to hire more people to help him. The successful entrepreneur will tend to make more money than the people who don’t create businesses and/or don’t work as hard as he does, which is why he is evil and needs to be punished with higher taxes.

ESP, n. 1. Extra Sensory Perception. when you use those extra perceptions that you have been hiding from yourself.

eternity, n. 1. not such a long time when viewed from a distance.

ethics, n. 1. the intention in the majority of people to do the right thing and to avoid the wrong. The predators that walk among us think this is very cute and are always seeking ways to exploit it.

ethnic cleansing, n. 1. a very old idea revived by Serbian psychiatrists, Radovan Karadzic and Jovan Raskovic, to provide their patient, Slobodan Milosevic, with the rationale he sought for the sanitation of his country’s racial stock. See racial hygiene, pure blood.

eugenics, n. 1. a method of population thinning advocated by idiots to reduce the competition.

euphemism, n. 1. unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. [Quentin Crisp]

evangelist, n. 1. an individual who injects enough holy ghost into you to last through most of the week.

Evolution, Theory of, n. 1. the theory that Shakespeare, Darwin, and George Bush are distant relatives of primeval amoebas. See natural selection.

evolutionist, n. 1. a believer in the Theory of Evolution, who sees not only biological, but also sociological and psychological, change as part of the overall pattern of planetary evolution toward a higher state. This social evolution toward a higher state is exemplified in such modern epitomes of progress as porn web sites, reality TV, punk rock, and tract housing. See progressivism.

eyes, n. 1. the part of the anatomy trained to see only what the person wants to see.

examination, n. 1. a test of an individual’s ability to take an examination.

execution, n. 1. the most effective way to change someone’s point of view.

exercise, n. 1. I take my only exercise acting as pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly. [Mark Twain] 2. I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me. [Mark Twain]

experience, n. 1. that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. [Franklyn P. Jones] 2. the name everyone gives to his mistakes. [Oscar Wilde]

expert, n. 1. one who has failed in a field, so he seeks to make a living advising others. 2. One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance. [Elbert Hubbard] 3. a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. [Niels Bohr] See authority.

expert witness, n. 1. an intellectual prostitute.

F

facilitation n. 1. (psychobabble) an ingenious form of leadership avoidance ordained by the priests of the anti-social sciences. The manager, rather than setting group goals and taking necessary actions to achieve those goals, acts as a moderator or coordinator while the employees more or less fend for themselves. Likewise, the teacher, rather than ensuring that students acquire essential life skills such as reading and math, gives the students free rein to educate themselves through brainstorming, group learning and other modern educational monstrosities. In short, the manager must not manage and the teacher must not teach.

fall, n. 1. the aptly-named time of year when leaves, thermometers, snowflakes, trips to the gym, spirits, and bank accounts drop.

family, n. 1. a reactionary institution that is resisting the enlightened efforts of the good folks in government and the anti-social sciences to take rightful charge of the rearing of children.

famous, n. 1. a characteristic of others that makes us tongue-tied, ridiculous, and/or envious, depending on our temperament.

fanatic, n. 1. one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. [Winston Churchill]

fantasy, n. 1. truth in disguise. 2. a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. [Dr. Seuss]

fascism, n. 1. a form of totalitarian government made possible by the desire of many to be ruled by someone who reminds them of their father.

fashions, n. 1. induced epidemics. [George Bernard Shaw]

fast food, n. 1. the quintessential American cuisine.

father, n. 1. the deposed lord of the castle, now relegated to serf and scapegoat.

FDA, n. 1. Food & Drug Administration, 1. that federal agency whose charter is to limit the health of the American public. 2. that agency of the U.S. government that seeks to protect the American public from vitamins, supplements, natural healing, chiropractors, religious healing, etc., because they make people more healthy and thus decrease the demand for more expensive drugs and treatments. See RDA.

Federal Reserve, n. 1. a private institution controlled by certain large Insider Banks that has ultimate control of the money supply and interest rates in the United States and therefore has the power to cause booms and busts in the economy which the insider banks can capitalize on. See central bank.

feel good morality, n. 1. (psychology) instant gratification enshrined as a virtue.

feminist, n. 1. a person who foolishly wants women to lower themselves to the level of men.

fidelity, n. 1. being true to one’s commitments, including especially to one member of the opposite sex – an idea that psychology has conclusively demonstrated to be obsolete. An individual’s responsibility is only to himself, says the psychologist. One should be faithful only as long as it serves one’s purposes and feels good.

film, n. 1. a distillation of life as we wish it would be.

fingers, n. 1. the appendages used to push the buttons on handheld devices and keyboards. 2. If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. [Frank Lloyd Wright]

finisher, n. 1. a pathological type of individual who completes what he starts. But for the efforts of these villains, the world would stop spinning and we all would fall off. See distraction.

fishing, n. 1. the sport of drowning worms. [Anonymous]

fishing rod, n. 1. a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other. [Samuel Johnson]

flag, n. 1. a colorful piece of fabric that men weep and kill for.

flea, n. 1. an eloquent proof that the universe is not a benevolent creation.

flesh, n. 1. a design flaw of animal bodies that makes them breakable and edible.

flower, n. 1. nature’s little aesthetic intermission between the acts of tooth and claw.

food, n. 1. dead animal or plant tissue that animals, due to some mis-design of the physical universe, need to consume. 2. a delivery system for condiments. 3. Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside. [Mark Twain]

force, n. 1. the physicial universe’s primary medium of exchange.

foreign aid, n. 1. a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. [Douglas Casey]

forgetting, n. 1. a convenient device for getting out of confessing our sins. 2. The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

fork, n. 1. an instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth. [Ambrose Bierce]

Founding Fathers, The, n. 1. that group of crackpots who felt that the only proper roles of government were defense, money, roads, mail, and maintaining a level playing field. Fortunately, saner heads have prevailed in the intervening years, giving us the Big Brother government we enjoy today.

free will, n. 1. Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. [Jawaharial Nehru]

freedom, n. 1. the oxygen of the soul. [Moshe Dayan] 2. I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it. [Thomas Jefferson] 3. If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. [Somerset Maugham]

Freedom of Information Act, n. 1. a law that places an onerous burden of accountability on hard-working, public-service-oriented bureaucrats who were only breaking the law and violating the rights of groups or individuals for the good of the country.

freeway, n. 1. a multi-laned thoroughfare designed for rapid, unimpeded travel, especially through metropolitan areas, which can usually be counted on to be a bit faster than an old lady in a powered wheelchair. 2. a fast conduit that permits city hordes to invade new outlying areas, turning the country into suburb and the fast conduit into a slow one – leading inevitably to a freeway improvement project. 3. the brainchild of oil companies and motor vehicle manufacturers to maximize the production of smog.

freeway improvement project, n. 1. a public works project to widen or otherwise enhance a freeway at many times the original cost, because the original planners were either too cheap or too stupid or too lazy to build an adequate freeway in the first place.

fruit labels, n. 1. those funny little stickum labels that get between a man and the succulent apple, pear, apricot, or plum he is attempting to devour.

funeral, n. 1. some people’s first and only chance to be the center of attention.

fuzzy math, n. 1. (education) the latest in a series of improvements in the teaching of math based on the principle that memorization is old-fashioned and that getting the right answer is not important. After all, it’s the idea that counts.

G

gangster, n. 1. a member of a large gang engaging in organized criminal activities, such as fraud, extortion, robbery, and murder. In other words, a member of the legislature.

gasoline, n. 1. the distilled remains of dead animals and plants used to create explosions inside of automobiles. See oil, smog.

Gates, Bill, n. 1. a man who never completed college and who therefore, sadly, will never be able to make anything out of his life. 2. a man who has given many, many millions to education, so that others can enjoy the advantages he never enjoyed.

genetic engineering, n. 1. the process of making vegetable and fruit Frankensteins with increased yields and/or enhanced disease resistance and unknown effects on the bodies of animals and humans that eat them.

genetic screening, n. 1. (psychiatry) a method of diagnosing mental patients before they are born.

genetics, n. 1. the field that says you are less important than your cells.

genius, n. 1. When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him. [Jonathon Swift] 2. I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly. [Buckminster Fuller] 3. If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. [Johann Everhart von Goethe] 4. A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition. [Charles Caleb Colton]

gentleman, n. 1. a man who holds the door open for ladies, and is thenceforth branded a pig.

germ, n. 1. an invisible monster that lurks in toilets, sinks, counter tops, and countless other household locales and that can only be warded off by the magical properties of disinfectants.

get a life, n. 1. a phrase used by conformists to goad or ridicule those more industrious than they into a greater appreciation of television, vacations, and parties.

getting old, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe.

ghost, n. 1. somebody who forgot to dress up for the party.

God, n. 1. the great practical joker. See Creator.2. the most popular scapegoat for our sins. [Mark Twain] 3. if God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated. [Voltaire]

golf, n. 1. a good walk spoiled. [Mark Twain] 2. a game in which you claim the privileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood. [Samuel Johnson] 3. Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick. [P.J. O'Rourke] 4. an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose. [Woodrow Wilson]

good, adj. 1. characterizing all actions of mothers, doctors, ministers, teachers, Republicans, and Democrats.

good breeding, n. 1. consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person. [Mark Twain]

good deed, n. 1. an act of kindness ministered to another, regardless of whether it was desired or not.

good example, n. 1. Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. [Mark Twain]

good life, the, n. 1. holidays and vacations and partying and retirement and other leisure activities touted as the meaning of life. Its over-hyping is the primary cause of the haunting aimlessness and depression that so characterize our civilization. See morale.

gossip, n. 1. a reporter.

government, n. 1. the surest way to get nothing done at great public expense.

government assistance programs, n. 1. the modern-day substitute for charity. These programs are a notable improvement over charity, because they are utterly ineffective, spread money indiscriminately amongst the populace, and perpetuate the conditions they so boastfully claim to address.

grade, n. 1. (education) a measure of a student’s ability to regurgitate under pressure.

graduated income tax, n. 1. a method of penalizing those so naïve as to believe in the American Dream. 2. a method of ensuring that all people, rich or poor, have a lower standard of living.

graffiti, n. 1. the artistic works of would-be masters who never will be.

grammar, n. 1. When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split. [Raymond Chandler]

grass, n. 1. a type of flora whose native habitat is the golf course.

grassy knoll, n. 1. the little hill overlooking the site of the Kennedy assassination from which gunshots definitely, definitely were not fired. See Magic Bullet.

gratitude, n. 1. the attitude of a slave toward the slavemaster who feeds him.

grave, n. 1. the recycling mill for used bodies.

gravitation, n. 1. the agreement that things fall when dropped.

greenhouse effect, n. 1. an expression of mankind’s natural impulse to commit suicide.

grief, n. 1. the window-washer of the soul.

grief counselor, n. 1. one of an army of well-meaning parasites sent in after a traumatic situation, such as a natural disaster, terrorist bombing, or act of senseless violence. Their mission is to stir up the incident for the victims to ensure that its traumatic effects persist longer.

group counseling, n. 1. (education) group therapy smuggled into the public schools. It allows the teacher to treble or quadruple her crop of future psychotherapeutic patients.

group learning, n. 1. ( education) a method developed by shrinks to turn out ignorant students who cannot read, write, or do math. It is based on the premise that academic skills aren’t really important. After all, the shrinks themselves got by without them. See cooperative learning, collaborative learning.

group therapy, n. 1. ( psychotherapy) wholesale introspection; an opportunity for several subjects to practice the skills most valued by shrinks – rummaging around in their minds and talking at great length and in gruesome detail to others about what they find.

guilt, n. 1. the highly-touted skill of searching within onesself and finding evil.

guest home, n. 1. a euphemism for rest home, which is a euphemism for the prison where old people are incarcerated.

gun control, n. 1. a workaround to the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has become necessary, because it was discovered that guns kill people. The Founding Fathers labored under the misconception that people killed people. 2. an effective way to increase violent crime, because it consoles the burglar or violent criminal that his intended victim will be defenseless. 3. a way to ensure that the government will have no second thoughts about infringing upon the rights of the people.

H

habit, n. 1. a shackle for the free. [Ambrose Bierce]

hallucinate, n. 1. to see things that are not there, as when a psychiatrist sees a mental disorder.

hallucination, n. 1. (psychotherapy) seeing something that the shrink doesn't think is there.

hand, n. 1. a device mostly useful for holding a cell phone while the fingers of the other hand push the buttons.

happiness, n. 1. that precious little reward that life presents us with as a by-product of purposeful, productive labor. It cannot be purchased, popped, or pursued in its own right. 2. Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig. [Albert Einstein] 3. The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. [Benjamin Franklin] 4. If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time. [Edith Wharton] 5. Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. [Abraham Lincoln]

harmony, n. 1. a false standard against which to measure a successful family, a successful venture, a successful life. An artist can inject harmony into a work of art and romantics are fond of projecting harmony into nature, but animals and particulary people participating in the free-for-all called life have about as much harmony as a classroom of pre-schoolers that has just been presented with a box of musical instruments. 2. The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. [Marcus Aurelius]

hatred, n. 1. a refreshing interlude from being nice. 2. a relative of anger, but far more satisfying.

healing, n. 1. restoring to proper function a physical or mental disfunction – an activity which is against the law in many states when not practiced by a licensed practitioner.

health, n. 1. the natural state of a body whose occupant does not interfere with it too much. 2. What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease. [George Dennison Prentice] 3. If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

health insurance, n. 1. a decision to become sick.

healthy, n. 1. (manufactured food) filled with a host of ingredients that are bad for you. See additive.

hearse, n. 1. death’s baby-carriage. [Ambrose Bierce]

heathen, n. 1. a benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. [Ambrose Bierce]

heaven, n. 1. a place where the food, climate, and views are spectacular, but where the entertainment is largely harp music. Show tunes and classical music are generally allowed, though there are significant exceptions. Soul music is borderline. Hard rock and rap are definitely not permitted. 2. a sort of perpetual massage parlor where you can have anything you want for eternity. In other words, a place of hellish boredom.

hell, n. 1. a place where you burn endlessly – unless of course you are an Eskimo and like the idea of endless heat, in which case you presumably freeze forever. 2. When I think of the number of disagreeable people that I know who have gone to a better world, I am sure hell won’t be so bad at all. [Mark Twain]

help, n. 1. the great divide between hope and hopelessness. Despite all the betrayals and the false nostrums, when a man has given up on help, he has given up on life. 2. that activity (when honorable and effective) signalled by the savagery of the attacks against it. 3. the name that vampires give to their intentions just before they sink their teeth into your flesh. 4. There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help themselves. You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb himself. [Andrew Carnegie]

hero, n. 1. someone who breaks several psychological laws to help others. 2. the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences. [Mark Twain] 3. A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

higher education, n. 1. a way of keeping someone out of the work force for an additional 4 years on top of the original 12 years. 2. where young adults are so crammed full of false data that they are incapable of functioning in life, let alone in the field of their choice. See Law of Higher Education, The.

higher-order thinking skills, n. 1. (education, psychobabble) (also critical thinking skills or HOTS) the latest educational breakthrough, based on the premise that it is the educator’s job to awaken in a child the ability to think rather than to teach the child how to learn. The so-called lower-order thinking skills (LOTS), such as the ability to read, to write, to do math, along with the acquisition of facts, are relegated to a backseat. This modern miracle of learning is accomplished by the students spending hours brainstorming together, cutting their intellectual teeth on the extensive, real-life experience they have gained through television, movies, video games, popular music, etc.. The teacher is no longer a teacher, but a facilitator.

hiking, n. 1. adventure in slow motion.

historian, n. 1. an unsuccessful novelist. [H. L. Mencken] 2. gossips who tease the dead. [Voltaire]

history, n. 1. gossip well told. [Elbert Hubbard] 2. a set of lies agreed upon. [Napoleon Bonaparte] 3. that huge Mississippi of falsehood. (Matthew Arnold) 4. .. what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. [Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel] 5. just one damned thing after another. [Arnold Toynbee] 6. In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has. [Mark Twain]

Hitler, n. 1. a zealous and efficient leader (Führer) who inspired Germans to assume their God-given role as the sanitary engineers of the planet. See racial hygiene.

holding a grudge, n. 1. not forgiving someone for doing something to you before you got a chance to do it to them.

Hollywood, n. 1. a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars. [Fred Allen]

holy war, n. 1. murdering lots of people and blaming it on God. See killing.

home, n. 1. the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. [Robert Frost]

homo sapiens, n. 1. an immortal and potentially omniscient being who thinks he is an animal.

homosexuality, n. 1. a choice to disagree with biology

honesty, n. 1. a trait revered by philosophers, idealized in the arts, indispensible for all effective human interaction, but broadly punished by police, the law, the media, bosses, teachers, and parents. See deceit.

honor, n. 1. the opposite of self-esteem.

hope, n. 1. a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper. [Francis Bacon]

horn, n. 1. a noise-making device installed in an automobile and roughly equlivalent to a dog’s bark in function and sound.

horse sense, n. 1. a good judgment which keeps horses from betting on people. [W.C. Fields]

hospital, n. 1. a tall, imposing building dedicated to the worship of the Body. 2. a place where sick people are deposited to prolong the time it takes for them to get well. 3. a place where normal people can contract all manner of interesting diseases.

hospitality, n. 1. the virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging. [Ambrose Bierce]

hostility, n. 1. an appropriate response to someone who says he's 'only trying to help you'.

HR Department, n. 1. (Human Resources Department) 1. that unit of a corporation whose primary mission is to shed the most productive employees and to retain the least productive at all costs. 2. that unit of a corporation that ensures that the managers and executives of the corporation are so busy with paperwork that they can’t get any work done. 3. once called the Personnel Department, the name was changed to Human Resources to show how much they cared for the person. 4. Few great men could pass personnel. [Paul Goodman]

human, adj. 1. in a rut; unable to change; obstinate like a bulldog that picks up some emotion, attitude, or pattern of behavior along the road and refuses to let it go. See man, human condition, human existence, humanoid.

human being, n. 1. a person. According to psychology, an animal. According to psychiatry, a robot.

human condition, the, n. 1. a strange state wherein an immortal, potentially omnipotent being pretends to be weak and limited. 2. a disguise worn by a god to escape responsibility. 3. the odd circumstance of the lightning pretending to be a light bulb.

human existence, n. 1. a state of repose interrupted by occasional loud noises and jostlings.

human nature, n. 1. a collection of the worst characteristics of humanoids as catalogued by those who do not think very highly of their fellow men. 2. It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly. [Anatole France]

human race, n. 1. a very slow, boring race indeed. Even the rat race has it beat.

human rights, n. 1. the freedoms of speech, press, religion, etc., which every country gives lipservice to while simultaneously punishing anyone who actually exercises those freedoms. 2. It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. [Mark Twain]

humanism, n. 1. the religious face of materialism. It is a set of beliefs embraced by the anti-social sciences, and, through the agency of psychology, implemented in most of the schools of America, thus flagrantly violating the separation of Church and State. These beliefs can be briefly summarized as follows:
1) that the universe just is; it was not created;
2) that there is no such thing as a spirit or soul;
3) that the mind (if it exists at all) arose through the process of evolution and is just another manifestation of the physical universe;
4) that the purpose of life is the perfection of life itself;
5) and that the major impediments to the realization of that purpose are religion and custom, which must be eradicated.

humanoid, n. 1. an Earthling who thinks and does what Authority or the Mob tells him to think or do, and who lives his life in a slumbering state, only occasionally waking up for a second and wondering, “How did I get here?” or “Why am I doing this?”, then goes back to sleep. Without his cooperation or acquiescence, all the great ills of the past would never have happened. A quick glance in the mirror will reveal that the humanoid looks a little bit like you and me. Also called Homo Stupiens. See idiot, human, human existence, brainwashing. 2. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. [Edward R. Murrow] 3. The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit …. [Miguel de Unamuno]

humility, n. 1. an invitation to be overlooked and walked over.

humor, n. 1. the only way to attempt the reform of one’s fellow men and stand some chance of not being shot. 2. emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. [James Thurber] 3. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven. [Mark Twain] 4. a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one's bottom. [Taki] 5. just another defense against the universe. [Mel Brooks] 6. the instinct for taking pain playfully. [Max Eastman]

humorist, n. 1. a phsyician of the soul who transforms pain, pathos, and exasperation into laughter.

hurry, n. 1. how humans compensate for inadequate planning.

husband, n. 1. homo domesticus. 2. an orangutan trying to play the violin. [Honore de Balzac]

hypnosis, n. 1. the natural state of most humans, which the hypnotist merely capitalizes on.

hypocrisy, n. 1. an homage that vice renders to virtue. [François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld]

hypocrite, n. 1. the man who murdered his parents, then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. [Abraham Lincoln]

I

iatrogenic, n. 1. a disease caused by medical treatment, hospitalization, over-medication, etc.. This is the primary way that psychiatrists expand their practice: Fearful of a world overrun with sane people, they feverishly invent new mental diseases and specialize in treatments that cause insanity, such as psychoactive drugs, electric shock, lobotomy, etc..

ice cream, n. 1. what the gods called ambrosia, but never gave away the recipe.

idea, n. 1. the most powerful weapon in the universe, the only effective defense against which is stupidity. Hence, ruling classses promote illiteracy, dissipation, and television to dumb down their citizenry. However, regimes that employ such idea-blunting devices always collapse: Stupidity is contagious, and the leaders inevitably catch it, too.

idealism, n. 1. an undeniably desirable quality in a leader, except that it generally comes packaged with madness. 2. To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! [H. L. Mencken]

idealist, n. 1. one who doesn’t let his ideas get contaminated by the facts. 2. one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. [H.L Mencken]

identification number, n. 1. one of the accumulation of arbitrary numbers without which you would not exist.

idiot, n. 1. a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech, and circumscribes conduct with a deadline. [Ambrose Bierce]

ignorance, n. 1. willful lack of knowledge. 2. Against ignorance the gods themselves contend in vain. [Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller]

illiteracy, n. 1. (education) the crowning chievement of modern teaching methods as employed in Amerca’s schools. See progressivism, Outcome-Based Education, higher-order thinking skills, whole-word method. 2. the primary tool of slave masters for making a pliable populace.

illness, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe. See disease.

illusion, n. 1. Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. [Mark Twain]

imagination, n. 1. the lifeblood of human existence, without which a person ceases to think, remember, or see. It is the ultimate target of all efforts to enslave humanity. 2. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. [Albert Einstein] 3. You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.. [Mark Twain] 4. the one weapon in the war against reality. [Jules de Gaultier]

immorality, n. 1. the morality of those who are having a better time. [H.L. Mencken]

immortality, n. 1. Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. [Susan Ertz]

impotence, n. 1. the collapse of modern man’s sole reason for living.

income, n. 1. the few pitiful bites left from the fruit of your labors after everyone else has taken their bites.

income tax, n. 1. an efficient means of lowering the standard of living of the nation. See graduated income tax. 2. The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax. [Albert Einstein] 3. We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork. [Milton Friedman]

industrial accident, n. 1. a serious mishap occurring at a place of work which is never an accident, but which always stems from some human error. See mechanical failure.

inflation, n. 1. the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. [Milton Friedman] 2. Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair. [Sam Ewing]

influence, n. 1. (politics) the complex interplay of gravitational forces that the succcessful politiical serpent must navigate on his slither to power.

information, n. 1. the modern substitute for wisdom.

Information Age, The, n. 1. a time when computers know everything and people don’t have a clue.

ingredients, n. 1. the list of things added to simple food for all kinds of nefarious purposes. See additive.

injury, n. 1. a state of physical or mental anguish 673% more common if the accident victim has a lawyer and the accused party has insurance.

injustice, n. 1. depriving some other social class of a fair break in the fond belief that this will secure a better break for one’s own class.

ink, n. 1. the primary ingredient employed in the manufacture of baloney.

ink blot, n. 1. (psychology) a device similar to a crystal ball and equally dependent on the imagination of the practitioner.

Inquisition, n. 1. an arm of the Roman Catholic Church founded in the 13th Century, whose job it was initially to encourage, and very soon thereafter to enforce, conformity to orthodox Catholic beliefs. Its functions and methods were passed on to psychiatry in the 20th Century.

insanity, n. 1. the inability to laugh. 2. the condition of having tried present time and having not cared for it. 3. a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world. [R.D. Lang]

insanity defense, n. 1. (law) a shrink's testimony that the perpetrator was not guilty of some serious wrongdoing because he was crazy at the time -– as though there could ever be a sane form of murder, rape, kidnapping, etc..

inspiration, n. 1. You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. [Jack London]

inspirational speaker, n. 1. a sort of spiritual drug. 2. a transplanted evangelist.

insurance, n. 1. a bet placed by an individual that things will go wrong.

integrity, n. 1. the misguided urge to be true to your own principles or decisions despite the obvious rewards for waffling, deceit, and betrayal.

intellect, n. 1. We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. [Albert Einstein]

intelligence, n. 1. an element peculiar to the individual and thoroughly lacking in groups. 2. (psychology) a property of a person’s mind that is unchangeable, a defeatist position rightfully disputed by psychiatry. Through the assiduous use of drugs, electric shock, lobotomy, etc, the psychiatrist has demonstrated again and again that intelligence can certainly be changed –- for the worse.

intention, n. 1. the godlike faculty that is in you to create whatever effect you intend. If this seems hard to believe, it's only because you harbor so many hidden, involuntary intentions to shoot yourself in the foot -- and they all come true, too. See Law of Intention.

interactive voice response, (IVR), n. 1. a modern electronic means to save your company money and thoroughly infuriate your customers.

interest, n. 1. a magnetic force emanating from inside people that powerfully attracts their attention toward some object separate from themselves, but which is powerfully repelled by any object that seeks to compel their attention, such as work or school.

international relations, n. 1. a branch of the anti-social sciences that seeks to foment sufficient instability in the relations of nations to ensure plenty of demand for their services in the years to come.

internet, n. 1. an improvement on the real world.

intimacy, n. 1. the relation of a man to his stomach. The relation of a woman to her charge card.

introspection, n. 1. an attempt to catch an image of onesself in the rear-view mirror.

introversion, n. 1. a hamster wheel that psychotherapists encourage their patients to run around in. See introspection, neurosis.

introvert, n. 1. someone who has had too much psychotherapy. See neurotic.

invention, n. 1. the ability of great minds to make simple things.

inventor, n. 1. one who leads the charge in mankind’s neverending battle with entropy.

investigative reporting, n. 1. an arena where the public's thirst for blood is satiated by feeding minorities and non-comformists to the lions.

I.Q., n. 1. Intelligence Quotient. 1. a highly-advanced measure of how many big, unusable words you know and whether you can tell your right foot from your left. See intelligence.

Iron Age, The, n. 1. that stage in history when man perfected his millenia-long quest for the perfect way to chop up his fellow men. See weaponry.

irony, n. 1. the normally undetected presence of iron in ink.

irrational exuberance, n. 1. too much wealth accumulating in the hands of normal people.

irreverence, n. 1. the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. [Mark Twain]

IRS, n. 1. Internal Revenue Service. The fund-raising arm of a charitable organization called the U.S. Government.

issues, n. 1. (psychobabble) when some poor slob has a problem or is bothered by something that the speaker considers senseless or annoying.

Ivy League School, n. 1. an exclusive institution of higher education that turns out a superior grade of human being. The Ivy Leaguer is the master of any crisis, because he knows more than any mere mortal and generates an irrefutable aura of superiority.

J

jazz musician, n. 1. a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. [Benny Green]

jealousy, n. 1. all the fun you think they had. [Erika Jong] 2. the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it. [Honore de Balzac]

jihad, n. 1. holy war; the Arab terrorist’s license to kill anybody he wants to.

journalist, n. 1. The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them. [Karl Kraus] See newsman.

judicial activist, n. 1. a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it. [Sam Ervin]

jury, n. 1. a jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. [Robert Frost]

justice, n. 1. People who love sausage and people who believe in justice should never watch either of them being made. [Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von,]

K

Kennedy, John F., n. 1. perhaps the most charismatic and high-minded president of the 20th century. Therefore he was assassinated. See Kennedy Assassination.

Kennedy Assassination, n. 1. proof that there are individuals who will commit any act for what they consider the greater good, and that they have sufficent clout at the highest levels of the US Government to cover it up once they have done it. See Grassy Knoll, Magic Bullet, Warren Commission.

kill, v. t. 1. a statistic in a news report concerning an insignificant reduction in the world’s population. 2. to create a vacancy without nominating a successor. [Ambrose Bierce]

killing, n. 1. Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God. [Jean Rostand]

kindness, n. 1. a tiny match that kindles the happiness of both giver and recipient. 2. the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. [Mark Twain] 3. A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. [Chinese Proverb] 4. True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joy of others. [André Gide]

King, Martin Luther, n. 1. a man who dedicated his life to the final ending of slavery in America. Therefore he was assassinated.

kissing, n. 1. an odd preface to an almost totally disrelated physical process. 2. a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other. [Rene Yasenek]

knowledge, n. 1. what you get when you're awake and pay even a little bit of attention to what's going on -- which tells you something about the state of most people around you. See sleep.

L

label, n. 1. a charged term that lazy or spiteful or calculating minds affix to people in order to pigeonhole them and thus avoid having to listen to them or treat them as people, such as child, heretic, infidel, Nigger, Jew, Scientologist, patient, mentally ill, schizophrenic, ADHD, and so on. See labeling.

labeling, n. 1. (psychology) a modern version of the primitive belief that knowing the name of a demon gives you power over it. See psychologist.

labor, n. 1. one of the processes by which A acquires property for B. [Ambrose Bierce] 2. You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind. [Anonymous] 3. a mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity. [Thomas Jefferson] 4. Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice. [Henry Ford] 5. As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. [Thomas A. Edison]

labor union, n. 1. a monopoly on the labor force of a particular trade or vocation, whose ultimate goal is infinite payment for zero production. See work.

land, n. 1. a part of the earth’s surface considered as property. [Ambrose Bierce]

language, n. 1. the helpless prey of advertisers, spin doctors, psychobabblers, social planners, and other linguistic predators. 2. the dress of thought. [Samuel Johnson] 3. the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words. [Samuel Butler] 4. We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them. [Abigail Adams]

lap, n. 1. One of the most important organs of the female system – an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult males. [Ambrose Bierce]

Latin, n. 1. If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world. [Heinrich Heine]

laughter, n. 1. the oldest and perhaps the most effective therapy known to man. See law of laughter. 2. the sun that drives winter from the human face. [Victor Hugo] 3. What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul. [Yiddish Proverb]

law, n. 1. Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. [Jonathan Swift] 2. Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable. [Anonymous] 3. Every law is an infraction of liberty. [Jeremy Bentham] 4. The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. [Lao-tzu] 5. Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws. [Walter Savage Landor]

law logic, n. 1. an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else. [John Quincy Adams]

law of authority, the, n. 1. The need for authority in a subject is inversely proportional to what is really known about the subject.

law of bureaucracy, the, n. 1. The amount of reak work that gets done by a bureaucracy is inversely proportional to the size of the bureaucracy.

law of causation, the, n. 1. All noteworthy events and all historical trends, whether good or bad, are caused by somebody. Human history does not simply happen; it is not the product of titanic, impersonal forces, as Marx and others would have us believe; it is always caused by the purposeful actions of one or more individuals.

law of criminal statistics, the, n. 1. Crime rates rise to the degree that psychology and psychiatry are allowed to work their influence in the schools, the courts, and the prisons.

law of effective subjects, the, n. 1. Effective subjects are standard.
-- Corollary: Ineffective subjects are non-standard. Where you find a withering variety of competing theories and myriad ways proposed for getting the same job done, you can rest assured that the subject is not effective and a waste of your time.
-- Corollary: In any effective subject, saviors will inevitably arise to reform it. Regardless of what they say, their underlying intention will be destruction. This they will accomplish by altering it or complicating it or otherwise making it less standard and therefore less effective. See law of intention.

law of higher education, the, n. 1. The amount of actual work that a college graduate can do in his or her chosen field is inversely proportional to the level of his or her degree in that field.
-- Corollary: Never hire a person to do work in a field he or she majored in.

law of intention, the, n. 1. A person always produces those effects that he intends to produce.
-- Corollary: Ignore what a person says and look at his products.

law of laughter, the, n. 1. The freedom of any society varies proportionately with the volume of its laughter. [Zero Mostel]

law of the incurability of conditions, the, n. 1.any practitioner in the field of the body or the mind who tells you that a condition is incurable or unchangeable is either incompetent or is reaping some benefit from not curing the condition. See cure.

law of medicine, the, n. 1. A man who cannot work without his hypodermic needle is a poor doctor. The amount of narcotic you use is inversely proportional to your skill. [Martin H. Fischer]

law of productivity, the, n. 1. You never produce more than half of what you intended to produce in a given unit of time.

law of psychiatric treatment, the, n. 1. The well-being of a patient is inversely proportional to the amount of psychiatric treatment he or she receives.
-- Corollary: If you hear of an individual whose condition was "improved" by psychiatric treatment or psychiatric drugs, look closer to see what definition is being used for "improved".

law of truth, the, n. 1. The truthfulness of a subject or activity is directly proportional to the violence of the reaction against it.

lawsuit, n. 1. vviolence for the non-valiant; a way of getting the government to commit the violence we are afraid to commit ourselves.

lawyer, n. 1. a thief on the right side of the law. 2. one who prevents normal communication between people, so that only litigation remains as a means of communication. 3. one skilled in the circumvention of the law. [Ambrose Bierce] 4. a person who writes a 10,000 word document and calls it a "brief." [Franz Kafka] 5. a gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it for himself. [Lord Brougham]

layoff, n. 1. a means of reducing expenditures by getting rid of irreplaceable knowhow.

laziness, n. 1. nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired. [Jules Renard]

leader, n. 1. a B or C student who excelled at sports or at getting along with people rather than studying.

left and right brain, n. 1. (psychology) baseless shrink folklore that has been picked up as gospel by idiots everywhere.

legal department, n. 1. that unit of a corporation tasked with making up for the lack of corporate innovation by suing competitors and thus impeding their innovation.

legal maneuver, n. 1. using abstraction for obstruction.

legislature, n. 1. the part of government that attempts to solve problems by indiscriminantly throwing money at them.

leg, n. 1. an inferior sort of wheel. 2. the appendage used to dangle over the edge of couches and automobile seats.

Lenin, n. 1. an idealist for whom no sacrifice by others was too great to achieve his aims.

lethal injection, n. 1. the administration of drugs to cure society’s ills.

liar, n. 1. someone who finds it inconvenient to tell the truth.

liberal, n. 1. someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. [G. Gordon Liddy]

liberated, n. 1. no longer constrained by any standard of right conduct.

liberation, n. 1. a change of slave-holders.

Libertarian, n. 1. an American political party that is ostracized because it believes that the Federal Government should not be everybody’s nursemaid.

liberty, n. 1. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote! [Benjamin Franklin] See freedom.

library, n. 1. a public service that benefits all citizens, rich or poor, increasingly neglected by city and county governments, who have their hands too full with mis-educating, drugging, jailing, and otherwise nursemaiding their unproductive citizens. See parks.

lie, n. 1. a falsehood that one was not clever enough to hide from others. See truth.

lie, the big, n. 1. the absurd doctrine that thought originates in the large lump of gray matter behind your eyes.

life, n. 1. a role-playing game where the rules are hidden and the players have mis-identified themselves with the pieces. 2. something that happens to you when you’re making other plans. [Margaret Millar] 3. the art of drawing without an eraser. [John Gardner] 4. Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along. [Samuel Butler] 5. just one damned thing after another. [Elbert Hubbard] 6. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. [Mark Twain] 7. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. [Grandma Moses] 8. a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

life source, n. 1. the elusive something that animates life which, among humans, we generally refer to as “I”. In this we are greatly deceived, however, for the anti-social sciences have conclusively demonstrated that you and I do not exist.

Lincoln, Abraham, n. 1. a man who had only six years of public school and who was therefore unable to make anything of his life. 2. one of the most pigheadedly principled presidents this country has had. Therefore he was assassinated.

lobbyist, n. 1. an expert at greasing legislative palms in order to push through a legislative agenda that is contrary to the best interests of the public.

lobotomy, n. 1. (psychiatry) the medical version of exorcising demons. 2. that operation that a psychiatrist could never perform on himself, because somewhere in the middle of the procedure, he would lose interest.

location, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe that makes it difficult for you to occupy more than one position at a time.

lock-and-key, n. 1. the distinguishing device of civilization and enlightenment. [Ambrose Bierce]

Los Angeles, n. 1. nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis. [H.L. Mencken]

losing your temper, n. 1. when you let your anger come out toward someone who deserves it, only to find out that this is the one occasion when they didn’t deserve it.

lottery, n. 1. a game always won by somebody else.

love, n. 1. when a girl or guy throws their best judgment overboard for the sake of genetics. 2. a temporary insanity curable by marriage. [Ambrose Bierce] 3. a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species. [W. Somerset Maugham] 4. an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses. [Lord Dewar] 5. an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. [Robert Frost] 6. a smoke made with the fume of sighs. [William Shakespeare]

lower-order thinking skills, n. 1. (education) (abbrev. LOTS) in modern schools , the less important academic pursuits that can be safely neglected, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, history, literature, and science. See higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), Outcome-Based Education.

lowering of awareness, n. 1. the urge of the stupid to be stupider by indulging in alcohol, drugs, newpapers, television, mindless sex, inspirational speakers, etc. See idiot.

low-flush toilet, n. 1. a toilet that uses more water than normal toilets, because of the constant necessity to re-flush.

luck, n. 1. the tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius. [Robert A. Heinlein] 2. I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. [Thomas Jefferson]

luxury, n. 1. the reward for someone’s hard work, enjoyed by the other members of his family. 2. the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master. [Kahlil Gibran]

M

machine, n. 1. what truly modern men and women seem to be aspiring to become.

Machine Age, The, n. 1. that chapter in the history of man which starts out with mechanical devices serving man and ends with man serving the mechanical devices.

magic, n. 1. when an individual performs an act that homo sapiens knows it would be incapable of.

magic bullet, n. 1. the single bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald that changed direction several times to kill President Kennedy. See Kennedy assassination.

male, n. 1. the gender expected to apologize.

man, n. 1. the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. [Mark Twain] 2. the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. [Mark Twain] 3. a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. [Mark Twain] 4. the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it. [John Steinbeck] 5. an intelligence in servitude to his organs. [Aldous Huxley]

mania, n. 1. (psychiatry) the mental disease afflicting someone who is too happy or too energetic.

manipulation, n. 1. he purpose of psychology as viewed by businesses, politicians, and social planners. See advertising, international relations, Outcome-Based Education.

mankind, n. 1. the aggregate of humans reduced to the lowest common denominator, otherwise known as homo stupiens. See idiot. 2. what you end up with after you pile on millenia of inquisitions and liberations and jihads and electric shocks in the name of the Deity du Jour.

marriage, n. 1. an impossible relationship between two individuals upon which the survival of the species depends. 2. the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgets them. [Ogden Nash]

martyr, n. 1. an individual with great ideas but poor plans.

Marx, Karl, n. 1. The German philosopher who enunciated the politico-economic theory called communism. He committed the classic blunder of insisting that people actually do something with his philosophy. His work was carried to fruition by his nephews, the Marx Brothers.

masculinity, n. 1. (education) a mental disease diagnosed by female teachers.

mastery learning, n. 1. (education) a new-fangled educational model that didn’t work and was ridden out of town on a rail. It sneaked back into town as Outcome-Based Education.

material wealth, n. 1. the worldly affluence and its accompanying spiritual decomposition that herald the end of all great civilizations.

mathematician, n. 1. a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. [Charles Darwin]

matter, n. 1. the stuff that people surround themselves with in order to gain permanence, only to discover that, in a world where change is the only constant, it is the most impermanent stuff of all.

mature, n. 1. old enough to watch X-Rated Movies, shop in porn shops, and go to topless bars.

meaningful dialogue, n. 1. (psychobabble) when two consenting adults expose their neuroses to each other.

mechanical failure, n. 1. a physical malfunction that always stems from a human malfunction, immediately visible or not. See industrial accident.

media, the, n. 1. the noisy, grating, distracting soundtrack of modern civilization.

Medicare, n. 1. a method of taxing those who can afford to pay for their own health care to the point that they can no longer afford to pay for their own health care. 2. a way of providing lousy health care to the greatest possible number of people.

medication, n. 1. (medicine) the euphemism that doctors employ in dispensing powerful drugs with countless side-effects and questionable efficacy in order to instill sufficient faith in the patient to capitalize on the patient's innate ability to heal himself.

medicine, n. 1. the name of the healing profession hijacked by the pharmaceutical industry over the last 100 years, now aptly named medicine due to its heavy drug dependency. 2. The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated. [Plato] 3. consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. [Voltaire] See medication.

mediocre, n. 1. Only the mediocre are always at their best. [Jean Giraudoux]

meditation, n. 1. an introspective method of seeking truth based on the premise that all truth lies within you. The catch is that an enormous number of lies lie within you, too, and the lies have the truths greatly outnumbered. 2. a booby-trapped route to self-awareness strewn with the bodies of the intrepid boobies who have fallen along the way.

meeting, n. 1. (business) a substitute for written communication in the American workplace, necessitated by the inability of most employees to read anything except comic strips, the sports page, and chatty emails. 2. a highly-efficient method of squandering the time of highly-paid employees and consultants.

memorandum, n. 1. Short form for memo. An attempt to communicate via the written word to individuals who, for the most part, cannot read. See email, meeting.

memory, n. 1. what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. [Edward de Bono] 2. the diary that we all carry about with us. [Oscar Wilde] 3. a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. [Pierce Harris]

mental disease, n. 1. (psychiatry) a set of symptoms despearately searching for an actual disease. 2. a set of behavior or thought patterns classified under an alarming, scientific-sounding name in order to reap the greatest profit. See Eight Easy Steps for Creating a Mental Disease. 3. what everything looks like through a psychiatrist’s eyes. 4. a disease invented by a drug company to increase the sales of its drugs.

mental health, n. 1. a grave condition requiring immediate redress, since it cuts into the profits of mental health practitioners. 2. (psychology) the state where the individual is totally adjusted to his environment and has schooled himself to cheerfully accept whatever happens. See well-adjusted, contentment. 3. (psychiatry) the state where the individual is quiet and doesn’t bother anybody.

mental health industry, n. 1. that army of caring individuals fully equipped with drugs and psychobabble marching on your community to help you whether you want it or not.

mental hospital, n. 1. a prison for objectionable individuals who can’t be convicted of any crime.

mental patient, n. 1. someone who has been labeled with a mental disease and still has sufficient insurance or other resources to pay for treatment. See cure.

metaphysics, n. 1. a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. [Immanuel Kant] 2. When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics. [Voltaire]

Miami Beach, n. 1. where neon goes to die. [Lenny Bruce]

Microsoft, n. 1. a software monopoly that makes most of its money by regularly obsoleting its own products.

middle age, n. 1. when your age shows around your middle. [Bob Hope]

middle management, n. 1. a type of parasite that infests the bureaucracies of large companies and governments.

middle name, n. 1. padding between the first and last name usually replaced by an initial.

midwife, n. 1. a woman who delivers babies less expensively and with a higher success rate than doctors, and so is constantly under attack by the medical establishment.

midwifery, n. 1. a thorn in the side of the medical profession, because it has delivered babies with a high success rate without drugs or lavish equipment since before the dawn of history.

mind, n. 1. a nifty device that people used to prize, but which they now largely try to dispense with through the use of television, drugs, psychotherapy, and other mind-annihilating activities. See lowering of awareness. 2. the turf staked out by psychology and psychiatry, which they continue to defend fiercely, even though psychology has long since vacated the premises and psychiatry has flatly denied that it exists. See lie, the big

minimum wage, n. 1. a method of reducing the number of available jobs and driving up prices.

minister, n. 1. a slacker who squanders his life helping other people and is in denial about the really important things in life, such as getting rich and partying.

misery, n. 1. almost always the result of thinking. [Joseph Joubert]

miss, n. 1. a title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. [Ambrose Bierce]

missionary, n. 1. the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals. Whenever they are on the brink of starvation, Heaven in its infinite mercy sends them a nice plump missionary. [Oscar Wilde]

misunderstanding, n. 1. when someone finds it inconvenient to understand.

mob, n. 1. a mass of people who drop down the evolutionary scale and start acting as theough they were a monster out of some B horror movie.

modern art, n. 1. painting and sculpture that allow the rich to bring the nightmare of contemporary life right into the comfort of their own homes. 2. an attempt to make non-round circles before one has learned to make round ones.

modern man, n. 1. a caveman in designer clothing.

modernism, n. 1. the self-evident conviction that we are smarter and do things better than those poor boobs who came before us.

modesty, n. 1. the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it. [Oliver Herford]

mom, n. 1. what you call your mother once you get to know her.

money, n. 1. that stuff that passes through your hands on its way back to the government. 2. They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. [Kahlil Gibran]

money manager, n. 1. an investor insufficiently competent to make a good living investing his own money, so he makes a very good living investing other peoples’ money poorly.

moral indignation, n. 1. jealousy with a halo. [H.G. Wells]

moral reasoning, n. 1. the ability to give just the right angle or spin to one’s sins. 2. Few love to hear the sins they love to act. [William Shakespeare]

moral relativism, n. 1. (social sciences) the modern idea promoted by psychologists, public schools, etc. that there is no absolute right and wrong and that one should therefore adopt the code of conduct that affords the greatest leeway in the exercise of one’s preferred transgressions. See Situation Ethics, Values Clarification.

morale, n. 1. the feeling of satisfaction and pleasure one gets when one forgets that one is supposed to be pursuing the good life and, for one giddy moment, actually works hard to produce something of value.

morality, n. 1. that which makes sin so tantalizing. 2. The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others. [Bertrand Russell]

mosquito, n. 1. an eloquent proof that the universe is not a benevolent creation 2. the state bird of New Jersey. [Andy Warhol]

mountain, n. 1. a temporary obstacle to the growth of cities.

mouth, n. 1. a design flaw of the human body that makes communication dependent on sound waves and interruptible by chewing, swallowing, and coughing.

moving, n. 1. that trick that life plays on us from time to time that makes us hate everything we own.

music video, n. 1. a meat commercial.

mystery, n. 1. a lie propagated by one who wishes to appear wise without going to the effort of acquiring wisdom. 2. a con game that has rewarded its practitioners since before the dawn of history.

N

nation, n. 1. a large group of individuals that acts collectively like one one big spoiled child.

national debt, n. 1. a reasonable metaphor for infinity.

national security, n. 1. the overzealous effort to preserve American freedom by taking it away piece by piece.

natural selection, theory of , n. 1. that force that keeps the idiots from completely inheriting the earth. See Evolution.

nature, n. 1. that part of existence that modern man works hardest to insulate himself from.

necessity, n. 1. a fabrication of Madison Avenue. See advertising.

neighbor, n. 1. a stranger.

nest egg, n. 1. the money you painstakingly set aside in case of emergencies, which gets blown by your kids after you’re gone.

neurosis, n. 1. (psychology) a mental condition you adopt in order to appear more interesting to yourself and others, thereby ensuring that you have lots of things to talk about. 2. what most people have instead of a life. 3. the tendency, encouraged by family, friends, and therapists, to interminably ask onesself probing questions that can never be answered. See neurotic, introspection, introversion, introvert. 4. a substitute for legitimate suffering. [Carl Jung]

neurotic, n. 1. someone who has taken self-awareness too far. See introspection, introversion.

New Age, n. 1. spiritual goulash.

newborn screening, n. 1. (psychiatry) finding mental diseases in people who haven’t even learned to talk yet.

New England Senator, n. 1. a rich guy who cares.

news, n. 1. the modern incarnation of the ancient, noble profession of gossip. 2. fast food for the brain.

newsman, n. 1. a bloodthirsty predator known to frequent large towns and cities. His natural prey is that elusive and endangered species, the story. 2. a person who believes that other people’s business is his business. See journalist, reporter, news.

newspaper, n. 1. The trouble is that the stupid people – who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations – do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper. [Mark Twain] See idiot. 2. a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier. [H. L. Mencken] 3. Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. [Ben Hecht] 4. The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. [Thomas Jefferson] 5. Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation. [George Bernard Shaw]

New York, n. 1. the nation's thyroid gland. [Christopher Morley]

noise, n. 1. the chief product and authenticating sign of civilization. [Ambrose Bierce]

normal, n. 1. (social sciences) the standard for human behavior, which all should strive to emulate. See normal man, average man.

normal man, n. 1. that individual who attempts to hide by pretending to be everybody. See average man.

nurse, n. 1. the primary actual care-giver in a hospital.

nursing home, n. 1. a prison for old people who have violated the laws of a god called Youth.

O

objectivity, n. 1. what the person arguing with you lacks.

obedience, n. 1. the trait that makes the slave most useful to his masters.

obesity n. 1. a condition that deforms the lives of most women in American – the minority because they suffer from it and the majority because they suffer from trying to avoid it.

obfuscation, n. 1. the purpose of philosophy.

obscenity, n. 1. whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. [Bertrand Russell] See pornography.

obsession, n. 1. (psychology) when someone puts more attention on something than the shrink thinks is appropriate. 2. insanity focused in a narrow direction, which, if it aligns with the insanity of the group as a whole, is considered the utmost of sanity and rewarded very highly.

obstacles, n. 1. those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. [Henry Ford]

obvious truth, n. 1. an idea that rings with such verisimilitude that few can hear the murmur of its utter falseness.

ocean, n. 1. the strongest argument that the water shortages suffered by so many of the Earth’s peoples must be a manufactured and intentionally-perpetuated condition.

office, n. 1. that tiny chunk of real estate given to an employee for years of service to the firm. The sign on the door bears his name and nothing else, because he has no clue what his job really is, nor does anyone else.

oil, n. 1. the decomposed remains of extinct animals and plants used largely for making air pollution and cute little dolls.

oil company executive, n. 1. an individual who occupies most of his time finding new ways of preventing people from conserving a finite, non-renewable resource.

old, n. 1. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. [Henry Ford] 2. There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age - I missed it coming and going. [J.B. Priestly]

old age, n. 1. when you stop being able to tell if you farted or not.

oncologist, n. 1. a doctor who engages in all-out warfare against the patient’s body, because he believes it has become possessed by tiny demons called “cancer cells”.

open mind, n. 1. If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters. [George Bernard Shaw]

opera, n. 1. where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. [Robert Benchley]

opportunity, n. 1. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. [Thomas Edison] 2. All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen. [Sidney Lumet]

origination, n. 1. starting something. Generally frowned on.

orthodox, n. 1. a religious term meaning adhering to traditional doctrine, which, appropriately though quite inadvertently, has come to be applied to the new religions of science and medicine. See orthodox medicne, orthodox science.

orthodox medicine, n. 1. that version of medical theory and practice officially sanctioned by some ecclesiastical authority, such as the AMA, in order to maximize profits for the medical priesthood and to help identify heretics, denounce them as quacks, and drive them out of business. 2. We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession. [George Bernard Shaw]

orthodox science, n. 1. a set of beliefs about the physical universe propagated and enforced by authorities who bear more than a striking resemblance to the high priests of the Dark Ages.

other people, n. 1. the people who are watching you and making you feel self-conscious – who, as it turns out, think that you are watching them. 2. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. [Oscar Wilde]

out of body experience, n. 1. when you pop out to have a look. 2. an unplanned concomitant of death. See clairvoyance.

outcome, n. 1. (education) (also called “learning goals”, “performance objectives”, “standards”, “competencies”, “capacities”, etc.) one of a number of milestones set by social planners at a national level, which students are expected to attain in Outcome-Based Education. These milestones have little to do with learning or academic achievement in the traditional sense and everything to do with making the child think and act the way the social planners think he should.

Outcome-Based Education, n. 1. (OBE) (also “mastery learning”, “achievement-based education”, “standard-driven education”, etc.) a master plan to totally revamp education – and hence society as a whole – through the use of behavior and thought modification in the classroom. See VEG.

outsourcing, n. 1. relocating the American Dream overseas.

overcompensation, n. 1. (psychobabble) a pejorative term employed by the mediocre to belittle the achievements of the exceptional.

ownership, n. 1. staking a claim on a piece of the physical or mental universe that was usually, at some point in the past, pinched from someone else. See patent, property.

P

pain, n. 1. the bread and butter of the pharmaceutical industry.

painting, n. 1. the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic. [Ambrose Bierce]

palm tree, n. 1. the sacred tree of Southern California.

paradigm shift, n. 1. (psychobabble) changing your mind in a big way, such as deciding that you’re really a mocha-type person rather than a latte-type person.

paranoid, n. 1. a man who knows a little of what’s going on. [William Burroughs]

parent, n. 1. an adult who labors under the misconception that his children are his responsibility, not the responsibility of any politician, teacher's union, or village.

park, n. 1. a public service that benefits all citizens, which has been elbowed to the side in order to better mis-educate, punish, and drug selected citizens. See library.

parking meter, n. 1. a money-grabbing device used in large cities to encourage people to take their business to the suburbs.

party, v.i. 1. to wallow in mindless dissipation, while everyone is busy convincing you that you are having a great time.

party politics, n. 1. bristling with indignation at the unforgiveable sins of the other party’s candidate while making allowances for the justifiable sins of your own party’s candidate.

past, n. 1. The past is never dead, it is not even past. [William Faulkner]

patent, n. 1. a trust deed on intellectual real estate.

patient, mental, n. 1. (psychiatry) a label affixed to an individual in the care of a psychiatrist so that unbiased observers will be able to distinguish him or her from the psychiatrist. 2. (psychiatry) the new second-class citizen in America, whose ranks are swelling due to the selfless efforts of psychiatry and its partners in government and industry.

Patriot Act, The, n. 1. another excuse, cloaked in patriotism and love of country, to undermine the Bill of Rights. See national security.

patriotism, n. 1. the kindling that clever madmen toss matches into to ignite their dreams of mass murder and enslavement. 2. One of the great attractions of patriotism -- it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and to cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous. [Aldous Huxley]

Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, n. 1. a Russian physiologist who is most famous for his experiments in conditioning dogs to salivate when they heard a bell. He was employed by the great humanitarian, Joseph Stalin, to condition the Russian people to salivate when they heard the Russian national anthem.

peace, n. 1. in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. [Ambrose Bierce]

peace of mind, n. 1. knowing that your underarms don’t stink and that your casket and gravesite are paid for.

people, the, n. 1. that part of the state that does not know what it wants. [Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel] 2. You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. [James Thurber]

perfume, n. 1. the fragrance of dead flowers in which decaying dowagers drench their bodies in a vain effort to keep their failing charms alive.

person, n. 1. the real individual, you and me, which psychiatrists have conclusively proven does not exist.

perspective, n. 1. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. [Anaïs Nin] 2. Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. [Arthur Schopenhauer]

pessimist, n. 1. one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. [Oscar Wilde] 2. a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist. [Elbert Hubbard]

pesticide, n. 1. a poison that farmers administer to vegetables and fruits in order to increase their crop yields and cause all sorts of elusive, incurable diseases to their customers.

pharmaceutical company, n. 1. a manufacturer of drugs that prolong the physical or mental condition they allege to remedy while lowering the awareness of the treated individual sufficiently to prevent his getting wise to the scam.

pharmaceutical company executive, n. 1. someone who has read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and thinks that universal drugging is a keen idea.

philanthropist, n. 1. a rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket. [Ambrose Bierce]

philanthropy, n. 1. giving generously to popular causes that ultimately cause nothing.

philosophy, n. 1. the field that encourages taking the broad view of a subject and thinking things through. Not advised for students of the anti-social sciences and other true believers.

phonograph, n. 1. an irritating toy that restores life to dead noises. [Ambrose Bierce]

phrenology, n. 1. a 19th century branch of psychology that studied the size, geography, and hairiness of someone’s skull in order to determine his personality and mental capability. Now chiefly replaced by the study of the left and right brain and other brainless myths that postulate fanciful, utterly unverified correlations between the brain and what goes on in a person’s mind.

physical sciences, n. 1. those mulish sciences such as physics, chemistry, and astronomy that perversely insist that their theories should bear some relation to the observable facts.

physical universe, n. 1.a rough prototype for a universe that shows promise, but also shows obvious signs of having been rushed into production. 2. a papier-mâché model constructed by a kindergarten class full of geniuses. 3. It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money. [H. L. Mencken]

piercing, n. 1. making a hole in some part of your body and sticking a metal object in it for the purpose of making some other person nauseated.

plastic, n. 1. a non-biodegradable material that will be the prize discovery of future archaeologists when excavating the ruins of modern cities. They will call ours The Plastic Age. 2. the primary ingredient in popular, fast-food hamburgers.

platitude, n. 1. an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. [H.L. Mencken]

pleasure, n. 1. the piece of candy that life gives us – or we give ourselves – for a job well done. Like candy, it makes us sick if we try to make it a steady diet. 2. Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. [Samuel Johnson]

poetry, n. 1. what people once ingested to enliven and enrich their lives, now largely replaced by drugs and television. 2. what gets lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. [Robert Frost] 3. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. [Marianne Moore] 4. a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. [Percy Shelley] 5. the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.[Carl Sandburg]

police, n. 1. that branch of a city government whose purpose is to make all citizens feel like criminals. See thief.

political correctness, n. 1. tiptoeing around the truth to avoid the possibility of stepping on somebody's toes.

politician, n. 1. a smart criminal. See lawyer. 2. one who realizes his personal ambitions by siphoning power and money from the people. 3. In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. [Charles De Gaulle]

politics, n. 1. the process of weeding out those candidates with integrity and independence, leaving only the corrupt ones who can be bought and controlled -- and then selling the corrupt ones to the populace. 2. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. [Ambrose Bierce] 3. the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. [Paul Valéry] 4. the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and then applying the wrong remedies. [Groucho Marx]

poor, the, n. 1. the class that capitalists exploit for economic reasons and that socialists exploit for political reasons.

pop psychology, n. 1. applying dumb theories to dummies in the dumbest way possible.

popularity, n. 1. the great enemy of truth.

pork, n. 1. (politics) a ham justifying some pork-barrel project with a lot of hogwash, while actually bringing home the bacon for some hog who has him in hock.

pornography, n. 1. material considered unsuitable for children and chiefly studied and admired by censors and moralists. See obscenity.

positive, n. 1. mistaken at the top of one’s voice. [Ambrose Bierce]

poverty, n. 1. the only fully effective tax-avoidance scheme.

power, n. 1. that which corrupts those who are hungry for power. 2. In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty. [Leo Tolstoy]

practical, n. 1. betraying your principles in order to make a living or keep your skin.

pray, n. 1. to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner. [Ambrose Bierce]

precognition, n. 1. a particularly nefarious way of cheating at the horse races. See clairvoyance.

prejudice, n. 1. a vagrant opinion without visible means of support. [Ambrose Bierce] 2. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. [William James]

prescription, n. 1. (medicine) a piece of paper inscribed with magical runes provided by a modern-day shaman to instill his fellow tribesmen with the confidence that they will be healed. See medication. 2. a physician’s guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient. [Ambrose Bierce]

prison, n. 1. an institution of higher education for criminals. It is where the criminal learns improved ways to commit crimes and avoid getting caught. 2. They put the beginners in with the confirmed criminals. This would be well if man were naturally inclined to good, but he isn’t, and so association makes the beginners worse than they were when they went into captivity. [Mark Twain]

profanity, n. 1. In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. [Mark Twain]

professional society, n. 1. a combination labor union and rooting section for a profession. Particularly in fields such as medicine and the anti-social sciences, where results are equivocal, the professional society has the role of drumming up business and suppressing competition. See quack,authority.

professional victim, n. 1. someone who has accidents for a living.

profit and loss statement, n. 1. (business) a magical artifact said to expose the inner mysteries of a corporation.

progress, n. 1. forward motion toward some arbitrary and usually senseless objective.

progressivism, n. 1. the belief, held by such visionaries as Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, that one has a unique insight into where civilization is heading and bears the responsibility to prod it along. (2) (education) the dogma that children learn best in a rowdy, curriculum-less, undirected learning environment, which no sane teacher would be able to tolerate for more than 7.3 minutes.

prohibition, n. 1. The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become. [Mark Twain]

promiscuity, n. 1. sexual relations à la carte. Clearly far more interesting than its opposite, fidelity, which psychologists have demonstrated to be obsolete.

promises, n. 1. To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. [Mark Twain]

propaganda, n. 1. The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. [Aldous Huxley]

property, n. 1. organized robbery. [George Bernard Shaw]

prophet, n. 1. an individual who seeks to tell the big truth, and who therefore steps on enough toes to wind up dead. 2. an announcer of future events whose words, though initially resisted, eventually come to be revered. However, the true prophet is an endangered species nowadays, because he generally lacks the forbearance to shut up in front of psychiatrists. 3. the voice crying in the wilderness. This is fine with everybody until the prophet comes out of the wilderness.

psychiatrist, n. 1. mental health practitioner who helps people by drugging them, running electricity through their brains, and slicing and dicing their gray matter. 2. a public employee whose job it is to shut up the insane so that they no longer annoy people. 3. a reality cop, the Grand Inquisitor of materialism. 4. the type of doctor who, if he isn’t totally insane yet, soon will be – that is, if he doesn’t commit suicide first.

psychiatry, n. 1. the direct descendent of the Inquisition, which has successfully promoted imprisonment, debilitation, and torture in the name of help, and which has won over most of the governments of the world, since governments have always considered imprisonment, debilitation, and torture to be the best methods of controlling their citizenry. 2. a study of the mind whose primary finding is that there’s no such thing as a mind. 3. the branch of medicine entrusted with the treatment of the insane. To expand its territory and take greater responsibility for suffering humanity, psychiatry has engaged upon an ambitious campaign to declare everyone insane – which now includes you.

psychoactive drug, n. 1. a mind-altering drug produced by drug lords, pharmaceutical companies and other entrepreneurial enterprises.

psychoanalysts, n. 1. father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the fathers as well. [Karl Kraus] 2. Psychoanalysis makes quite simple people feel they’re complex. [S.N.Behrman]

psychobabble, n. 1. the promiscuous use of already vaporous psychological jargon by pop psychologists and other aspiring busybodies in order to sound hip and protect themselves from colliding with any actual truth.

psychological research, n. 1. a form of professional hallucination.

psychologist, n. 1. a student of rats and other creatures that he considers most similar to human beings; a ratologist. 2. a mental health practitioner who cures people by labeling them with scientific-sounding names. In this he is the heir to the necromancer, who believed that knowing a demon’s name gave him control over it. 3. a neurotic who does his best to help other neurotics, but who is really just trying to figure himself out. 4. an auto mechanic who asserts that no one can understand an engine and that engines cannot be really fixed, so the driver must learn to accept his malfunctioning engine as it is.

psychology, n. 1. a mind-numbingly simplistic subject that has not solved one human problem personal, political, economic, or social, but which has wormed its way into a dominant position in education, the courts, government, business, medicine, the media, and popular culture – and which, predictably, has caused calamatous declines in all those areas. 2. the preferred college major of less intelligent people. 3. a religion of the mind founded on three beliefs: (a) man is an animal; (b) man thinks with his brain. (Corollary: The mind, if it exists, is irrelevant.) (c) man cannot be changed; therefore he must be conned into correct behavior. (Corollary: The mind, if it exists, cannot be changed; therefore it must be conned into thinking right thoughts.) See complexity of the mind, I.Q., law of the incurability of conditions, law of effective subjects, accept, contentment, lie, the big.

psychosomatic disease, n. 1. a set of actual physical symptoms afflicting a person and caused by the mind. Particularly perplexing to psychiatrists, who hold as a basic tenet of their belief system that there is no such thing as the mind.

psychotherapist, n. 1. a modern-day priest, but generally less effective. Nowadays, the majority of priests and pastoral counselors study psychology, which makes about as much sense as Beethoven studying elevator music.

psychotherapy, n. 1. the blind leading the blind. 2. a form of experimental psychology where the subject pays for the experimentation. See eclectic method.

psychotic, n. 1. an individual who is no longer inhabiting the same world as other people.

public, n. 1. that place into which it used to be safe for women and children to venture out after dark.

public, the, n. 1. that mass of people that politicians, businessmen, and the media are always trying to serve or cater to or reach. It bewilders them sometimes, because all they ever really wind up with is just people. See public opinion.

public education, n. 1. a way to prevent someone from entering the work force for as long as possible. See higher education.

public employee, n. 1. the new leisure class. 2. someone who is unemployable in his field of expertise.

public opinion, n. 1. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. [Mark Twain]

public school, n. 1. a prison for children complete with chain-link fences, body searches, involuntary confinement, enforced drugging, etc.. 2. an institution whose purpose, according to the founding fathers, was to create a literate populace. Its improved modern purpose is to create passive, well-adjusted, amoral citizens, who will follow where they are led. See Outcome-Based Education. 3. a powerful remedy for curiosity and a desire for learning, whose side effects include boredom, rigid thinking, and an inability to function in the real world. 4. a mental health clinic for children.

public servant, n. 1. an employee of the government who is supposed to serve the public, but who thinks that it is the role of the public to serve him.

punishment, n. 1. attempting to change someone’s point of view through the use of force. The most effective version of this is execution, since, as a matter of careful observation, the offender never takes the offending point of view again. 2. the public exercise of the people’s inalienable right to revenge. 3. a confession by the punisher that he has lost faith in his ability to exercise any control over the punishee.

pure blood, n. 1. (from the Spanish, Sangre Limpia) the primary motive behind the Spanish Inquisition, one of the illustrative forebears of German racial hygiene and Serbian ethnic cleansing.

Puritanism, n. 1. helps us enjoy our misery while we are inflicting it on others. [Marcel Ophuls] 2. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness. [H. L. Mencken] 3. the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. [H. L. Mencken]

Q

quack, n. 1. (medical) an individual who successfully applies healing techniques to another without a license, thereby posing a menace to orthodox medicine. See professional society.

queen, n. 1. a woman by whom the realm is ruled when there is a king, and through whom it is ruled when there is not. [Ambrose Bierce]

queue, n. 1. standing in line for a long time. One of the notable triumphs of modern civilization.

R

race, n. 1. There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages. [Mark Twain]

racism, n. 1. the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason. [Abraham Joshua Heschel]

racial hygiene, n. 1. the program proposed by psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz as early as 1895 to purify mankind of inferior racial elements. It was carried forward by other psychiatrists in Germany and the U.S. in the years that followed, and finally adopted as a national policy by Adolph Hitler in the 30’s. Psychiatry is still pushing this program today with such proposals as genetic screening, newborn screening, and ethnic cleansing, as implemented by the Serbian visionary, Slobodan Milosevic.

racial prejudice, n. 1. an ingnenious method of bolstering your personal self-esteem by asserting that entire races are inferior to you.

rack, the, n. 1. one of the clever devices used in the Middle Ages to stretch the minds (and bodies) of individuals in order to persuade them to change their point of view.

radical, n. 1. a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air. [Franklin D. Roosevelt] 2. The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them. [Mark Twain]

railroad, n. 1. a highly-efficient method of transporting goods and people between two places, which was laregely replaced by freeways and automobiles, because it didn’t burn enough oil.

rationality, n. 1. the clever ability to make one’s conclusions align with commonly accepted prejudices.

RDA, n. 1. (Recommended Daily Allowance) 1. a dose of a vitamin recommended by the FDA that is insufficient for actual health, but enough to prevent the severest effects stemming from a deficiency of that vitamin. This is of course part of the FDA's heroic campaign to stave off too much health in the American public.

reading, n. 1. an old-fashioned way of acquiring information, now not taught in public schools and largely replaced by television.

Reading Disorder, n. 1. according to the psychiatrist’s diagnostic bible, the DSM-IV, this is mental disease #315.00, where a student’s accuracy or comprehension of written materials is substantially less than it should be. This comes from an abnormality in the brain which a teacher can’t do anything about; it must be treated by mental health specialists. However, an earth-shattering breakthrough in mental health treatment was made recently when it was discovered that reading ability improved markedly when the student looked up the words he didn’t understand and was given something to read that he was interested in.

realistic, n. 1. (the arts) showing things as they really are – that is, unhappy, cruel, futile, exploitative, filled with pain and suffering, etc. Realism teaches the obvious truth that there is no hope anywhere and that it is naïve to seek a happy, productive life. See reality.

realism, n. 1. the art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. [Ambrose Bierce]

reality, n. 1. what we agree is real. 2. a harsh, cold, immutable fantasy that father figures insist you must face. 3. merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. [Albert Einstein] 4. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. [Albert Einstein]

reality show, n. 1. a real television production that pits real idiots against challenges never found in the real world.

real world, n. 1. an interesting place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

reason, n. 1. the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities. [Paul Eldridge]

reasonable, n. 1. accessible to the infection of our own opinions. [Ambrose Bierce]

reasoning, n. 1. Often, in matters concerning religion and politics, a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s. [Mark Twain]

reform, n. 1. That desire which is in us all to better other people’s condition by having them think as we think. [Mark Twain]

regret, n. 1. the pastime of the not quite busy.

regurgitation, n. 1. the highest standard of understanding sought by public school teachers. This is because they never understood the subject themselves.

rehabilitation, n. 1. taking a criminal and turning him into a hardened criminal.

relativity, n. 1. When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity. [Albert Einstein]

religion, n. 1. a set of beliefs, practices, and institutions that the founder of that religion would find unrecognizable. 2. beams of light from heaven used as bars to imprison. 3. The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. [Mark Twain] 4. a fashionable substitute for Belief. [Oscar Wilde]

remedy, n. 1. the next problem. 2. Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses. [Jean Baptiste Molière]

remission, n. 1. the dodgy term that oncologists apply to cancer when they can’t detect it anymore and hope it’s gone, but they’re not sure and it probably isn’t.

reporter, n. 1. a newsman who sees one thing and reports another.

Republican Party, n. 1. the party that loudly touts free enterprise and the American Dream, while quietly slipping handouts to big business.

research, n. 1. (social sciences) deciding on your conclusion in advance, then setting out to find only those data that support it, ignoring those data that do not – and inventing data if necessary. 2. a convenient justification for gouging the public.

responsibility, n. 1. a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star. [Ambrose Bierce]

retirement, n. 1. a misguided endeavor to eliminate effort from one’s life. Its natural consequence is increasing atrophy, mental, physical, and spiritual, culminating in death.

retirement community, n. 1. a place where old people go to ready themselves for death.

revolution, n. 1. Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder. [George Bernard Shaw]

rich, the, n. 1. individuals who are punished for working harder or being cleverer than other people.

riding, n. 1. the art of keeping a horse between you and the ground. [Anonymous]

right, n. 1. (psychology) what you can get away with or what feels good. 2. (law) one of those privileges protected by the Bill of Rights, which all branches of governement seek tirelessly to undermine. 3. I have a right to nothing, which another has a right to take away. [Thomas Jefferson]

right and wrong, n. 1. [social sciences] that collection of agreements that form the bedrock of a culture, which psychologists and educators, in their great wisdom, seek to improve upon or do away with. See custom.

righteous indignation, n. 1. the way you feel when someone has almost found out what you really did. See blame.

ritual, n. 1. a set of motions and/or sounds that seem intensely significant -- and probably were once -- but which nobody can remember exactly what they were for.

robot, n. 1. (psychiatry) The stated objective and end product of psychiatry. See automaton. 2. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. [Erich Fromm]

Russia, n. 1. a people that terminated their experiment with communism in the late 80’s, only to find themselves exploited by the same gangsters, now turned capitalist, who used to exploit them under communism.

S

sacred cow, n. 1. a subject or object that you’re not supposed to question or criticize. If you have the presence of mind to take a careful look at it, you will find that it is usually just a lot of bull.

sadness, n. 1. almost never anything but a form of fatigue. [Andre Gide]

saint, n. 1. a virtuous individual celebrated after their death, because they were such a nuisance during their life. 2. a dead sinner, revised and edited. [Ambrose Bierce]

sanity, n. 1. (social sciences) the degree to which someone conforms to the set of agreements that his culture calls reality. 2. the ability to laugh at your most cherished opinions. 3. what would appear as genius -- or madness -- to someone less sane.

Satan, n. 1. the first consultant. [Mark Twain]

satire, n. 1. a form of humor not easily understood by solid citizens.

schizophrenia, n. 1. (psychiatry) a severe psychotic disorder characterized by some combination of delusions, hallucinations, incoherent speech or behavior, and emotional instability. The usual treatment is powerful, addictive mind-altering drugs with numerous side effects, even though there is a vast body of research that indicates that schizophrenics recover best (or at least as well) when they are put in a safe setting with people who care about them and just talk to them and do not drug them.

scholar, n. 1. someone who can only survive in environments well insulated from the real world, such as accounting, computer programming, law, politics, psychology, or teaching.

school, n. 1. that public institution where today’s children are treated for mental diseases. 2. The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. [Robert Frost]

science, n. 1. a modern priesthood whose ceremonial dress is the white lab coat.

scientific establishment, n. 1. the high priests of the religion of science whose primary role is the persecution of real scientists.

scientific theory, n. 1. an accumulation of postulates as to the nature of reality that undergo seismic shifts from time to time, but which nonetheless are defended with a zeal and intolerance unsurpassed by the religious crusades of old.

scientist, n. 1. someone of above-average intelligence and training who will build bombs or develop biohazardous chemicals for any madman with money.

scientist, real, n. 1. one who makes significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical universe, identifiable by the vehemence of the reaction he or she receives from the establishment, scientific or otherwise. See genius.

scriptures, n. 1. the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based. [Ambrose Bierce]

search for truth, n. 1. a quest engaged on by a miniscule few to find out what’s really going on, which requires that they open your eyes, see what’s really there, and deal with that reality regardless of the discomfort it may cause. Such a search is usually rewarded with poverty and disillusionment. See prophet. 2. a half-hearted search engaged upon by dilettantes to learn a little bit about life, provided it doesn’t conflict with their self-interest or sacred cows or appointment at the massage parlor. 3. a road that the spectator does not go down; he only watches the others as they pursue their quest and laughs at them when they stumble. See reporter, newsman.

second amendment, n. 1. the right to bear arms. The founding fathers made this the second amendment to the constitution right after freedom of speech, religion, and press (the first amendment), because they considered it unimportant and debatable, and wanted to make it easier for wiser future generations to repeal it.

secret, n. 1. the surest way to ensure everybody finds out about it.

self, n. 1. you as a hypothetical object. 2. a hall of mirrors of which shrinks are the proprietors.

self-actualization, n. 1. ( psychobabble) the view that one’s life is a thing one constructs or fashions, rather like a kinetic sculpture or a hat with a mound of flowers and fruits on it.

self-awareness, n. 1. awareness turned back on itself, like a snake devouring its own tail. It is highly prized by shrinks, because it turns normal people into neurotics and neurotics into psychotics, thus insuring future business. See self.

self-criticism, n. 1. the ultimate victory of the critic. He criticizes you enough that you start doing it to yourself.

self-esteem, n. 1. ( psychobabble) feeling good about yourself even when you don’t deserve to feel good about yourself.

self-esteem training, n. 1. ( education) a key element of progressive programs such as Outcome-Based Education. It embraces:
(1) the elimination of testing, because some students will get lower grades than others;
(2) cooperative learning, because some students will be traumatized by having to stand on their own feet or think for themselves; and
(3) feel good morality, because some estudents might be damaged emotionally if forced to do something they don't want or prevented from doing something they do want.

self-interest, n. 1. ( psychology) doing what feels good or what benefits onesself regardless of how it harms one's family, friends, groups, nation, mankind, etc.

senility, n. 1. when you don't want to remember anymore.

sense of humor, n. 1. that willingness to laugh that is absent from murderers and psychiatrists all the time, and is absent from policemen, judges, and funeral parlor employees when they are on the job.

senseless violence, n. 1. a side effect of powerful, addictive mind-altering drugs, whether procured on the street or prescribed by well-meaning psychiatrists.

sentimentality, n. 1. the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. [Norman Mailer]

seriousness, n. 1. the greatest weapon mankind has against that most pernicious and counter-productive of human urges: the impulse to have fun. See solemnity, sense of humor.

service station, n. 1. a commercial establishment that sells gas and provides no service.

sex, n. 1. a mechanism created by the powers of darkness to distract people from important things. 2. an activity engaged in by few but thought about by many. 3. "Bed," as the Italian proverb succinctly puts it, "is the poor man's opera." [Aldous Huxley] 4. emotion in motion. [Mae West]

sexual object, n. 1. when one individual’s sexual desire is aroused by another individual, and that other individual objects.

Shakespeare, William, n. 1. an individual who didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, or indeed to any institution of higher education, and who therefore could not have been the author of the plays of Shakespeare.

shame, n. 1. an emotional luxury not enjoyed by the true criminal.

share, v.i. 1. to give someone else a portion of something that you originally intended to keep to yourself.

shin, n. 1. a device for finding furniture in the dark. [Anonymous]

ship, n. 1. Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. [Samuel Johnson]

shopping, n. 1. the primary rite of worship to the Great God of Stuff.

shrink, n. 1. (short for head-shrinker) a psychiatrist; that is, one who shrinks patients' heads. By extension, one who feels threatened by his fellow men and so seeks to shrink them down to size. 2. an inadvertent admission that many popular psychiatric drugs cause brain shrinkage.

silence, n. 1. that which people feel compelled to fill with something.

simplicity, n. 1. the ultimate sophistication. [Leonardo DaVinci]

sin tax, n. 1. a tax on luxury items (such as booze and cigarettes) that are stigmatized as naughty in order to justify the usual political maneuver of stealing from the minority to give to the majority.

sincerity, n. 1. a convenient pose when the girl is unsusceptible to flattery.

situation ethics, n. 1. (education) the idea that a child of seven should be able to make a snap decision right there, right now, in the moment of temptation, as to what is right and wrong. See moral relativism, values clarification.

skepticism, n. 1. the beginning of wisdom.

sky, n. 1. the greyish-brown roof over modern cities.

skyscraper, n. 1. a tall building dedicated to the worship of the Almighty Buck.

slang, n. 1. language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. [Carl Sandburg]

slave, n. 1. someone who has permitted himself to become the property of another. 2. someone who thinks that chains are stylish.

slavery, n. 1.an economic system wherein one class of people owns another class of people, controls their labor, and does not allow them to own anything. Its modern equivalent in the Western World is the 9 to 5 job.

sleep, n. 1. that state wished for by the tired and the stressed, little suspecting that it is the state they are in most of the time.

smog, n. 1. the primary contribution of oil companies to modern civilization.

smoking, n. 1. It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. [Mark Twain]

sneezing, n. 1. I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures. [Robert Benchley]

social planner, n. 1. someone who believes that he can run a society and the lives of its people better than the people themselves – and who has been empowered by the state to do so. See technocrat.

social sciences, n. 1. (also anti-social sciences) 1. a group of subjects utterly dependent on an understanding of the human mind, ultimately the province of psychology, and therefore hopelessly doomed to failure, because psychology doesn't have a clue, having abdicated the study of the mind over a hundred years ago. 2. that collection of ologies that once fell under the umbrella of religious studies, but which have attempted to remake themselves in the image of the physical sciences – and which have therefore fallen into the bottomless abyss between the two. 3. the primary cause of the decline of Western Civilization in the last 150 years.

social scientist, n. 1. someone who is neither social nor a scientist.

social security, n. 1. a pyramid scheme that rewarded the children of the Great Depression and has exacted an increasing burden on all the children since.

social worker, n. 1. the ambulance chaser of the mental health field.

socialism, n. 1. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. [Winston Churchill]

socialized medicine, n. 1. a method of ensuring that every member of the society has lousy health care.

society, n. 1. the mob. 2. Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down. [John W. Gardner]

sociology, n. 1. a religion that asserts that normal behavior is right and that the normal man is the model that all should seek to emulate.

software, n. 1. the true workhorse of the computer age capable of laboring in many vital human endeavors, but which, like any workhorse, has bugs.

solemnity, n. 1. what one is supposed to have when some valuable thing is lost or some important ritual is being enacted. There must be no "fun" in "funeral". See seriousness, sense of humor.

solid citizen, n. 1. an individual who takes life very seriously – and is on a mission to make sure you do, too.

soliloquy, n. 1. a dramatic device utlized by Shakespeare and his fellows to reveal the thoughts of a character by having him talk to himself before the audience. This device has since been preempted by the modern neurotic.

soul, n. 1. a valuable object that is issued to you at birth for safekeeping. If you take proper care of it, it will be rewarded forever. If you don’t take proper care of it, it will be punished forever. It is not clear in this arrangement what happens to you while your soul is rewarded or punished forever. See hell, heaven. 2. a sort of vehicle that is leased from the heavenly dealership. It comes with a lifetime warranty. However, the management can take it back at any time if you violate the fine print. This fine print is unfortunately too tiny for you to read. It can only be read by certain blessed individuals who presumably have stronger glasses. 3. a piece of equipment that you think you have, but that is actually what you are. 4. One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let ]it get in again to that or any other. [Lord Byron]

space, n. 1. what you create every time you look at something.

space race, n. 1. a highly successful campaign dreamed up by certain unsung science fiction writers in the 50’s and 60’s to distract Russia and the United States from that other, far more expensive race – the arms race.

special interest, n. 1. the little tug boat that pushes the giant ocean liner of society whither it wishes.

spring, n. 1. one of the two times in the year when it gets neither too cold nor too hot. Preferred by those who don’t like either summer or winter. Disliked by those who prefer either summer or winter.

spy, n. 1. a criminal who, operating outside the law, lies, steals, murders, and double-deals for the government or business that employs him, thus inevitably causing more damage than benefit to his employer.

statistics, n. 1. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. [Benjamin Disraeli]

stimulus-response, n. 1. (psychology) The primitive push-button mechanism that drives lower organisms and shrinks. See automaton, robot.

stock analyst, n. 1. an egghead who makes a very good living advising others to buy stocks that have already gone up or to sell stocks that have already gone down.

stock market, n. 1. a gambling establishment that is legal in all states.

stock market crash, n. 1. a financial catastrophe that devastates all but the insiders who caused it.

story, n. 1. (journalism) an incident like any other, but with the special property that it lends itself to distortion or embellishment.

street, n. 1. a route of commerce hewed into the landscape that will one day, when it is abandoned, melt back into the landscape.

stress, n. 1. the natural feeling of compression or urgency that the physcial universe dishes out when a person engages in production or effort of any kind. The psychologist of course considers stress unhealthful, since he himself is so allergic to work. See stress leave. 2. (psychobabble) the mystical cause of anything the psychologist doesn’t understand.

stress leave, n. 1. ((business) a new form of paid vacation. See stress.

strike, n. 1. the most dramatic way that labor demonstrates its aversion to actual labor.

student, n. 1. plastic for society's mold.

study, v. t. 1. to read information with the purpose to understand and use it, an activity considered unimportant in modern educational theory and practice.

stuff, n. 1. the hands-down most popular deity in the world today, which citizens of practically every country worship devoutly. See materialism, shopping.

stupidity, n. 1. the slavemaster’s only effective defense against dissident ideas. If the slaves are supid enough, they won’t object to their captivity. There are two flaws to this approach: (a) stupid slaves are not very productive; and (b) stupidity is a highly contagious disease, which the slavemasters eventually catch as well. 2. an elemental force against which no earthquake is a match. [Karl Kraus] See idiot, newspaper.

suburbia, n. 1. where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. [Bill Vaughn]

sue, n. 1. doing violence to others with low risk of getting your nose rearranged.

suffering, n. 1. a favorite game of victims.

sugar, n. 1. a naturally occurring sweet substance found in fruits and other plants, which is widely used in processed foods because of its addictive qualities.

suicide, n. 1. one of the side-effects of powerful, addictive mind-altering drugs, such as those given to children in our public schools.

summer, n. 1. the time when it gets hot. Preferred by some people who like to take off their clothes. See winter, autumn, spring.

sun, n. 1. the source of nearly all energy on planet Earth, directly and indirectly, and therefore unacceptable as an energy source to power homes, machines, and factories.

Sunday School, n. 1. a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. [H.L. Mencken]

surf board, n. 1. an unstable wooden platform perched above lethal waves and ridden by madpeople.

surgeon, n. 1. a body repairman.

Surgeon General of the United States, n. 1. the high priest and chief public relations officer for orthodox medicine and pharmaceutical companies.

symptom, n. 1. that which the vast majority of physical and mental treatments address. A good treatment addresses symptoms, not causes, thereby ensuring that the condition will persist and will continue to accrue revenue for the caregiver and his symbionts.

synergy, n. 1. two or more parts of a thing or group working together to produce a result greater than the sum of the parts, as when two monolithic, unfriendly banks merge to create an even bigger, less friendly bank – or when a committee comes up with a complex plan that no one likes and no one is able to implement.

T

tact, n. 1. the ability to describe others as they see themselves. [Abraham Lincoln]

tax, n. 1. the way the government gets back its money that somebody foolishly allowed to get into the public’s hands. 2. The power to tax is the power to destroy. [John Marshall] 3. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. [Mark Twain] 4. We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. [Winston Churchill]

taxpayer, n. 1. someone who works for the federal government, but doesn’t have to take a civil service examination. [Ronald Reagan]

teacher, n. 1. someone insufficiently competent to make a living in their field of expertise, so they make a living passing their incompetence on to others. See regurgitation. 2. a professional person praised for their dedication and excused for their inability to teach children to read, write, do math, or acquire any other knowledge or skills necessary for life. 3. a recruiter for the psychotherapeutic and pharmaceutical industries. 4. He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. [George Bernard Shaw]

teacher’s union, n. 1. an organization whose first objective is to separate children out from the influence of their stupid parents.

teaching, n. 1. a venerable profession traditionally dedicated to bestowing upon children useful skills for life, which has allowed itself to be gradually taken over by an upstart operation called psychology, which believes that children are animals and that the purpose of education is to condition the animals to be good citizens and workers. The irony is that, by applying this animalistic philosophy, modern schools have created both very bad citizens and very bad workers.

technocrat, n. 1. a government functionary who believes that a nation can best be run as a machine rather than as a collection of individuals. See social planner.

technology, n. 1. a field of practical knowledge capable of producing products or repeatable results that are visible, usable, and valuable. This of course rules out most fields taught in the modern university.

technomania, n. 1. an unreasoning drive for the bigger, faster, and niftier, heedless of any need for the resulting products or any consequences of their production or use.

teenager, n. 1. a person caught between the world of the child and the world of the adult, and screaming loudly about it.

television, n. 1. 1. a highly efficient, ultra-modern method of piping raw sewage into your brain. 2. a medium that seeks to amuse as many as possible while offending as few as possible. 3. the modern substitute for reading. 4. the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what the people want. [Clive Barnes]

telling the truth, n. 1. one of the few unforgivable crimes.

temple, n. 1. a large building, typically with a steeple or tower, dedicated to the worship of God. Now chiefly replaced by hospitals and skyscrapers, which are dedicated to the worship of the Body and the Almighty Buck respectively.

temptation, n. 1. to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. [Mark Twain]

terrorist, n. 1. someone who knows he could never live in a nice house or have any of the other blessings of affluent society, so he figures the best thing to do is ensure that others can’t have those blessings, too.

test, n. 1. an objective measure of the learning of a student or the effectiveness of a product, whose results or findings cannot be tampered with except with the application of sex or money.

Texas, n. 1. the place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least. [H.L. Mencken]

theory, n. 1. (social sciences) a belief. 2. (psychology) a contrived explanation of an imaginary condition backed up by delusory data.

therapeutic state, n. 1. the government making sure that all their citizens are well-adjusted and well-drugged, whether they want to be or not.

thief, n. 1. an individual who thinks he has a right to steal anything that the possessor is stupid enough to make stealable. See lawyer. 2. a necessary component of the game of cops and robbers. That is why prisons rarely rehabilitate thieves: It would spoil the game.

things, n. 1. that with which people populate the world in order to escape emptiness. See silence, stuff.

thinking, n. 1. an exercise of the mind too often conducted without the exercise of the eyes. 2. a draining and frustrating mental exercise chiefly characterized by running around in circles. 3. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. [William James] 4. Misery is almost always the result of thinking. [Joseph Joubert]

3 R’s, n. 1. reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now only begrudgingly taught in the public schools.

time, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe that makes the things you like go too fast and the things you don't like go too slow. See relativity. 2. the great thief. 3. the illusion that things change. 4. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. [Albert Einstein]

tired, n. 1. the word that best characterizes this writer at this time.

torture, n. 1. the Inquisition's method of adjusting the heretic's point of view to agree with the orthodox view of reality. The modern equivalent is electric shock, lobotomy, etc., used by the psychiatrist for the same purpose.

tradition, n. 1. the foundation of any culture targeted for the wrecking ball by reformers of every stripe, smug in their sophomoric self-righteousness. See custom, humanism, modernism, progressivism, Puritanism, socialism.

tragedy, n. 1. being exposed to the toxicity of human existence without the natural antidote of laughter.

trail, n. 1. the last line of defence against the spoiling of natural wonders by the automobile.

transformation, n. 1. (psychobabble) a fancy way of saying that you now occasionally wear red or eat escargot.

trap, n. 1. an illusion to which you grant the power to entrap you.

treadmill, n. 1. originally a continuous belt that a person or animal walked upon to drive a machine for grinding grain. It came to be synonymous with the worst type of labor – boring, repetitive, exhausting, low-paying – the sort of work that one could never escape from except by dying. It now describes a machine that people use voluntarily as a form of recreation.

treatment, n. 1. (psychiatry) the administration of drugs, electric shock, or lobotomy in order to ensure that the patient never stops being a patient. See remedy, torture.

truism, n. 1. something that is probably false. See common knowledge.

truth, n. 1. observations about the underlying nature of existence discovered by certain unique individuals. These observations must of course immediately be refuted, lied about, altered, etc. to protect the status quo. 2. a volatile substance like plutonium that tends to decay the moment it is discovered. 3. a simplicity that eludes us because we ourselves are too complex. 4. (the media, politics, advertising, sales) a lie.

Twain, Mark, n. 1. a man with only sixth grade education, and so, of course, unable to speak or write anything of any substance or value.

tyranny, n. 1. The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. [John Hay] 2. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable. [Aldous Huxley]

U

ultimate truth, n. 1. a supposedly absolute, immutable commodity that varies alarmingly according to who the salesman is and what he is trying to sell.

unemployment, n. 1. capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden. [Orson Scott Card]

United Nations, n. 1. hog’s heaven for the social planners.

United States of America, n. 1. a nation that pundits would have us believe is hated and despised by most of the peoples of earth, but which still attracts hundreds of thousands of hopeful immigrants every year. 2. a place where unpopular views are punished by anonymity or persecution. This is a marked improvement over many other places, where unpopular views are punished by extradition, imprisonment, or beheading. See American Dream.

university, n. 1. that ultimate quarantine area where promising minds are kept out of the mainstream long enough to ensure that they never contact an original thought. See higher education, school.

unknowable, the, n. 1. a veil placed over something to keep you from looking directly at it. 2. Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. [John Morley]

unrealistic, adj. 1. the crime do-nothings accuse do-somethings of to try to get them to stop.

uphill, n. 1. the price you have to pay for the reward of going downhill.

utopia, n. 1. that ideal world dreamed up by Dr Jekyll that becomes a nightmare when inevitably implemented by Mr. Hyde. 2. a magnet for parasites.

V

vacation, n. 1. the meaning of life.

values clarification, n. 1. (education) (also called “decision making”, “values based education”) coaxing the young student to abandon traditional morality and develop his own moral code from scratch. The wisdom of this approach can be seen in the rising popularity of such laudable activities as childhood violence, computer hacking, contempt for adults, homelessness, and illiteracy. See moral_relativism, situation ethics.

VEG, n. 1. the trio of disciplines that constitute Outcome-Based Education (OBE), replacing the 3 R’s in America’s public schools. They are: Values clarification – self Esteem – Group learning. The students who graduate from this form of education may not be able to read, write, do math, think, or perform any of the other functions necessary to survive as an adult, but they feel good about themselves when they join a gang, use drugs, and kill people.

vegetable, n. 1. what modern man aspires to be.

victim, n. 1. one who does himself in in order to blame or entangle others.

victim, professional, n. 1. one who has accidents for a living.

video surveillance device, n. 1. an electronic device designed to observe people doing things people wouldn’t have dreamed of doing 100 years ago and would only have fantasized about doing 50 years ago.

violence, n. 1. one of the side-effects of powerful, addictive, mind-altering drugs, such as those given to children in public schools like Columbine High School.

VIP, n. 1. somebody who pays extra for a quality of service that once was available to all.

virtue, n. 1. adherence to a roster of right behaviors engineered to extract the most obedience out of a person while providing the least fun. 2. insufficient temptation. [George Bernard Shaw] 3. What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. [Voltaire] 4. Water which is too pure has no fish. [Ts'ai Ken T'an]

vision, n. 1. the ability to imagine a rock concert where there are only rocks. 2. (psychiatry) the ability to see a mental patient where there is only a normal person.

vitamin, n. 1. a natural, non-addictive substance that the body needs. Vitamins have been shown to significantly contribute to increased health at minimal cost, which explains why the FDA has attacked them relentlessly.

voices, hearing, n. 1. a condition that the psychiatrist considers very serious. He should know.

vote, n. 1. the way you grant your acquiescence to the evil done by your government.

W

walking, n. 1. a dignified, gentile way of getting around. Not practiced by Angelinos.

war, n. 1. communication with bullets when communication by other means has been prohibited or exhausted. 2. God's way of teaching us geography. [Paul Rodriguez]

War on Drugs, n. 1. the domestic version of the Vietnam War, but longer, more costly and more futile.

Warren Commission, The, n. 1. a hand-picked group of esteemed public individuals, including the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and a future President of the United States, whose job it was to certify that President John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin and to suppress all evidence to the contrary. See Kennedy Assassissination, Magic Bullet, Grassy Knoll.

waste, v. t. what people tend to do to with handouts, stolen goods, inheritance, and other material goods that come to them unearned.

water, n. 1. a theoretically colorless and tasteless liquid drunk at some peril by residents of metropolitan areas.

wave, n. 1. the water that rolls toward the seashore after whales have gone by.

wealth, n. 1. the cruelest slavemaster of all.

weaponry, n. 1. one of two products in which man has invested the greatest amount of cleverness and labor down through history, the other being alcohol. 2. You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. [Will Rogers]

welfare, n. 1. Robin Hood economics. 2. charity enforced by bayonet. 3. that program of modern government that tends to turn normal people into criminals by giving them something for nothing. 4. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. [George Bernard Shaw]

welfare worker, n. 1. a public employee who has a vested interest in not solving other people’s problems. 2. a public employee who needs to feel superior to someone.

well-adjusted, n. ( psychobabble) 1. frantically juggling one’s viewpoints and behavior in order to affect an outward nonchalance in the face of the pandemonium inside. 2. the primary goal of psychological counseling. It is a tacit admission on the part of a psychotherapist that they can’t change patients and can’t help patients mold the world around them, so they try to get them to accept and adjust to the way things are. 3. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. [Krishnamurti] See contentment.

Western Civilization, n. 1. It would be a good idea. [Mohandas K. Gandhi]

whistling, n. 1. an inexplicable sound that comes out of your mouth when you pucker up your lips and blow.

whole-word method, n. 1. (education) (also “whole language method,” “look-say method,” “sight-words method,” “meaning-emphasis method,” “language experience method,” “eclectic method,” “psycholinguistics”, “literature-based method”) teaching a student to recognize whole words rather than break a word into syllables using the traditional phonics system. It is touted as a revolutionary educational breakthrough that bypasses the unnecessary step of sounding out a word and allows the student to zero right in on comprehension. In practice, it undermines the whole Western invention of phonetic alphabets and is the primary cause of dyslexia, reading disorder, and skyrocketing illiteracy.

wind, n. 1. that force of nature that blows smog to you or away from you (and toward other people) depending on where you live.

winter, n. 1. the time when it gets cold. Preferred by some people who like to wear jackets. See summer, autumn, spring.

wit, n. 1. the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation. [Mark Twain]

witch, n. 1. the specialist in herbs and natural healing for centuries, who turned out to be a bit too flammable to survive into modern times.

wonder drug, n. 1. this year’s new, improved, tailor-made, non-addictive solution to dreaded mental disorders such as snoring and nose-picking with only a few minor side-effects – which next year turns out to be addictive and mind-damaging with terrible side-effects – which is OK, because we’ve got this new wonder drug with only minor side-effects that’s tailor-made for snoring and nose-picking.

work, n. 1. a design flaw of the physical universe that makes it necessary for you to endure all sorts of inconveniences in order to eat. 2. (labor) the effort to do as little as possible for as much as possible. 3. whatever a body is obliged to do. [Mark Twain] 4. If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. [Martin Luther King, Jr.]

world, n. 1. a movie that is never as good as the book. 2. a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. [Horace Walpole] 3. Maybe this world is another planet’s hell. [Aldous Huxley]

worry, n. 1. As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. [Thomas A. Edison] 2. I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating." [E. B. White] 3. I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. [Mark Twain] 4. There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality. [Seneca] 5. Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen. [Pliny the Younger]

worship, n. 1. the attitude of the thoroughly whipped dog toward its master.

writer, n. 1. someone who can never think of the right thing to say, so he at least figures that by writing it down he’ll get the last word in.

Y

Youth, n. 1. the fickle god that is worshipped on television, in movies, in spas and health clubs, and in hospitals.

Z

zombie, n. 1. a normal person. See normal man, humanoid.

zoo, n. 1. where the animals can observe the humans from a safe distance and behind the protection of steel bars.

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Copyright © 2006-2007 by Everhart Sraem. All non-italicized definitions – the ones in normal font – represent completely original material concocted by myself. If, due to some flaw in your character, you wish to make use of any of these non-italicized definitions, you are free to do so for any non-commercial purpose whatsoever, provided that you do not change the definition and clearly attribute it to Everhart Sraem.