The Roycroft Dictionary

F

FARMER: 1. A man who raises early feed for potato-bugs. 2. One who supplies raw stock for vaudeville jokes. 3. A man who makes his money in the country and blows it in when he comes to town. (Farms were first devised as an excuse for the Agricultural Department at Washington.)

Failure: 1. The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but never does it himself. 2. A man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Fashion: A barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.

Fame: To have your name paged by the "buttons" of a fashionable hotel.

Faith: 1. The effort to believe that which your commonsense tells you is not true. 2. The first requisite in success.

Fake: An event that occurs every four years in the United States; hence, by extension, anything popular.

Family Line: The clothes-line.

Fast Train: One that has no diner.

Fear: 1. A club used by priests, presidents, kings and policemen to keep the people from recovering stolen goods. 2. The thought of admitted inferiority. 3. The rock on which we split.

Feathers: Secondary s*x advertisements made of fiber and horsetails, and used on ladies' lids as eye-gougers and such.

Feud: A fool idea fanned into flame by a fool friend.

Feminist Movement: 1. A hot desire to step on the male tumble-bug. 2. An uneasy, eccentric, patho-psychio gyration, caused by disappointment or thwarted ambition. 3. A loose cam or a cosmic monkeywrench in the convolutions.

Fifth Avenue: 1. The widow's chance. 2. A rabbit-warren. 3. The underworld of the upper world. (Fifth Avenue begins at the Washington Arch and really ends at Fifty-ninth Street. Above Fifty-ninth Street one goes into the sacred precincts of monasteries and nunneries. In this district the inhabitants are divided into two classes: those who barely live and those who live barely.)

Fly: A sententious, epigrammatic stylist who puts a period after each utterance.

Folderol: Talk or conversation of any kind between a man and a woman that does not contain an invitation or a promise.

Forbearance: 1. To forgive an enemy who has been shorn of power. 2. To buy golden opinions of one's self. 3. To slay with irony or pity.

Forecast: To observe that which has passed, and guess it will happen again; to anticipate the future by guessing at the past; to predict that an event will happen, if it does, by basing calculations on events that have already happened, if they did. (One may forecast and be right, wrong, or neither. It depends.)

First Requisites: 1. Belief in yourself. 2. Pride in your work. 3. Useful hands, clear eyes, and a good breath.

Forehead: 1. The facade of a cosmic bagnio. 2. A screen that hides the obscene. 3. The ramparts of a portable Bastile.

Fortitude: That quality of mind which does not care what happens so long as it does not happen to us.

Forum: A safety-valve for letting out superfluous air. E. g., "Let the Forum always be open to the people, and let the treasury always be open to us."-From Titus Livy's Psychology of the First Contractor.

Fra: A literary silo that feeds the world.

Frame-Up: See Brandeisism in the last edition of the Century Dictionary.

Friendship: 1. Something that by any other name would be as brittle. 2. A tacit agreement between two enemies to work together for common swag. 3. The aspiration to boredom. 4. To do unto some one that which you would not allow him to do unto you.

Friend: The masterpiece of Nature.

Frat: 1. A scheme whereby you lock the world out by shutting yourself in. 2. A non-productive plan of self-incarceration in a brain bastile by a mental midge of either s*x, or none. 3. A make-believe compact for purposes of piffle. (See snip-pity, top-lofty, tabascoish, supercilious.)