The Roycroft Dictionary

D

DAWN: 1. The beginning of a daily instalment in a serial story that will never end. 2. That mystical hour wherein Dives goes belching into dreamland and Lazarus comes out yawning carrying a dinner-pail.

Death: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's membership in the Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces.

Debt: 1. A rope to your foot, cockleburs in your hair, and a clothespin on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise.

Demagogue: One whose highest ambition is to stand on the grave of a great dead industry and boast to an army of unemployed of his bloody deeds.

Decalogue: 1. The stakes that hold in its place the social circus-tent. 2. A collection of commandments formulated by a person who has broken them all. 3. An incubator in which eaglets are transformed into capons. 4. A fence that confines animals that can not climb or fly. (The most famous Decalogue is known as the Ten Commandments. Whoso has obeyed this Decalogue in toto has died obscure, poor, unsung, unwept, and overlooked by Clio.)

Dogma: 1. A hard substance which forms in a soft brain; a coprolitic idea; a lie imperiously reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe they believe what some one else believes. 2. A paying thought or doctrine. 3. A recession into the Divine or Imperial-hence, the father of graft.

Democracy: 1. A form of government by popular ignorance. 2. The dwarf's paradise. 3. Any political system where male votes are substitutes for brains. (This word comes from the Abracadabra: "demo," lungs; "crazy," to rule; hence, to rule by caloric.)

Dennis: The man who expresses the things he thinks other folks think he thinks.

Dollar: A disk of metal which has eucharistic qualities; a sacred, miraculous object, contact with which is looked upon as curative and prophylactic.

Diary: 1. To see one's self as no one else cares to see us. 2. A book that describes the birth, effulgence and disappearance of pimples. 3. The lavatory of literature.

Diplomacy: An endeavor to side-step Nemesis.

Diplomat: A man who says "perhaps" when he means no, as opposed to a woman who says "perhaps" when she means yes. (A man who says "no" is not a diplomat, and a woman who says "yes" is not a lady.)

Dignity: 1. A state of spiritual, mental or emotional starchiness that precedes a bluff. 2. A sartorial and tonsorial chef-d' uvre. 3. The bodily attitude of a speaker or a preacher in the presence of people whose duty it is to believe he is not lying to them. 4. A mask we wear to hide our ignorance. (Man has dignity, woman has poise, animals have power; hence, dignity in a man or woman is anything that is a substitute for power.)

Disappointment: 1. The cradle of the ideal. 2. The skeleton of Purpose and the skull and crossbones of Desire. 3. A feeling in regard to the past that comes to every one on the Thirty-first of each December. 4. The final issue of any act begun yesterday, today or tomorrow. 5. The original road to Damascus and Horeb. 6. An alluvium deposited by the waves of Time in the human soul, and which becomes the basis of psychological Mont Blancs.

Discord: A guinea-hen, a peacock and a bluejay singing a trio.

Disadvantage: Having too many advantages in life.

Devil: A god who has been bounced for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.

Doctor: 1. A person who has taken seriously the biblical injunction, "Physician, heel thyself!" 2. In Germany, a swashbuckler person with many scars, much admired by small boys and unhappily married ladies, and feared by shopkeepers.

Disinterested: 1. Whatever is inconceivable. 2. A hypothetical ether that surrounds all forms of selfishness and naturalness. 3. That psychological interval when we look the other way before making a grab. 4. A monkey's mental attitude toward the hen.

Dishonorable: 1. To avoid infamy and almost attain respectability. 2. The first feeling we entertain toward each new acquaintance. 3. Any action whatsoever committed by a competitor.

Duty: A pleasure which we try to make ourselves believe is a hardship.

Divorce: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite s*x who desire to respect and honor each other. 2. A marital derail.

Divorcee: 1. A female fugitive from injustice. 2. Any lady who is a Post-Graduate in Love's Correspondence-School.

Discontent: 1. Inertia on a strike. 2. The mainspring of progress. 3. The starting-point in every man's career.

Disinherit: 1. The prankish action of the ghosts in cutting the pockets out of trousers. 2. To leave great sums of money to lawyers. 3. A method of insuring postmortem notoriety-and disappointment.

Doubter: 1. One who picks his teeth, blows his nose on his napkin, and yawns at the Lord's table. 2. A good-for-nothing who does not knock before entering the bathroom of the Faithful.

Dream: 1. A place where the starving feel the pangs of gluttony, and the threadbare wear opera-hats and spats. 2. A magic mirror wherein the dead appear to mock us with their happiness. 3. A cerebral phenomenon caused on upper Fifth Avenue by eating too much, and on the lower East Side by eating too little. 4. The Valhalla and the Welsh Rabbit; the Brocken where the souls of the animals, fish and birds we have eaten hold their revels; a private theater where indigestion is the prompter.

Duchess: The feminine of Dutchman.

Dynamo: Any man who has everything he eats, drinks, smokes and wears, charged.