The Roycroft Dictionary

H

HAPPINESS: 1. Something that might have happened yesterday, but which will never happen tomorrow. 2. A postprandial state of mind, which is most often a presage of acute gastritis. 3. A loving-cup, the bottom of which is like a sieve. 4. A mental state compounded of wine, women and tobacco. 5. The exploitation and final triumph of an instinct in the individual that society has branded as wicked or dangerous. 6. Forgetting self in useful effort. 7. A habit-cultivate it.

Habit: The buffer of our feelings; the armor that protects our nerve-force; the great economizer of energy.

Heart: An organ in the human body whence comes the impulse to get divorced.

Haggis: The quintessence of all that has been said by all the Presidents, Governors, and Mayors in the United States since Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine.

Hand: 1. A conventionalized bread-hook. 2. An attachment at the end of the human arm which gives to another a lemon, or something that the owner of the arm can no longer use or that is harmful to him.

Hair: The Olympus of the pediculid .

Heaven: 1. The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. 2. Largely a matter of digestion. 3. An orphan asylum where institutionalism reigns. 4. A penitential colony where the virtuous and the good are condemned to eternal fellowship for their stupidities uttered on earth.

Hate: 1. The shoal on which our bark is stranded. 2. A habit.

Has-Been: Any man who thinks he has arrived.

Hell: 1. A Papal bull. 2. An extinct volcano. 3. The Pantheon of the brave. 4. An ancient conflagration that was checked when Voltaire invented the asbestos intellect. 5. A theological corn, wart or tumor. 6. The sense of separateness. 7. Three telephone systems in a town. 8. An invitation to go sightseeing. E. g., "If I'd only had a parachute at the time I would have gone to hell gracefully and taken a record for descent."-From Lucifer's Confessions of a Ticket-o'-Leave Man.

Husband: A booby prize in life's lottery.

Helta-Skelta: The new substitute for Strenuosity. Puts you to sleep while you work. Helta-Skelta is a prepossessing product made from posthole polyglot piecrust, and is warranted free from teddine, swaboda, korona, kabo and karezza. Served face to face with cream or without, it is spit out as soon as chewed, and can not be swallowed. Locate the lavatory and try a free sample.

Hen: The only animal in Nature that can lay around and make money.

Highbrow: 1. A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superstitious awe, and whose worship of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force.

Highflyer: Any man who rides on the running-board, when he might just as well be inside the limousine.

History: 1. A collection of epitaphs. 2. Gossip well told.

Home: 1. A place where we go to change our clothes so as to go somewhere else. 2. The abode of the heart.

Humor: The tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.

Humility: 1. The slippered patience of the disinherited. 2. The grogginess of the Ego. 3. To recede to the very bottom of one's own littleness. 4. The Marseillaise of the disappointed. 5. The odor of sanctity. 6. An Iago in plush and lavender. 7. Pride getting ready for a Pounce.

Honeymoon: 1. A happiness not quite worn out. 2. A postlude to a wedding-march and a prelude to a funeral ditto. E. g., "I did not drive Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate my pet pippin, but because they insisted on carrying on their honeymoon before the modest animals."-From The Private Journal of D miurge.

Hope: 1. A substitute for yesterday. 2. A mask that dying persons wear. 3. A system of metaphysics founded by Ananias. Antonyms: Reason, imagination, experience.

House: 1. A building with four walls and a roof. 2. A rendezvous for burglars. 3. A dormitory for servants. 4. The Mecca of bedbugs. (The difference between a house and a home is this: A house may fall down, but a home is broken up.)

Human Love: The one indestructible thing in Nature.

Human Dynamo: Any man who gets everything charged.