The Roycroft Dictionary

S

SACRILEGE: 1. Any impolite act in the presence of a Humbug. 2. To shock the sensibilities of a Nobody. 3. To kill a mystical Mule or swap jokes in public with a Ghost.

Sacred Soil: That which is well tilled.

Saint: 1. Generally speaking, a person who retires into the wilderness of the spirit in order to coddle a ruling weakness. 2. To become polite toward God and His universe. 3. A steeplejack on miraged minarets.

Saintship: The exclusive possession of those who have either worn out or never had the capacity to sin.

Sanity: The ability to do team-work.

Saloon: The poor man's club; run with intent to make the poor man poorer.

Savages: Men who like to go to war.

Sanatorium: The place where a man is sent who has money, as opposed to "Bughouse," meaning the place where a man is sent who has no bank-balance.

Satirist: 1. A taxidermist of the Past, Present and Future; one who disembowels, stuffs and mounts all the gods, living and dead; one who fills up with straw and sawdust all illusions. 2. An esoteric mimic. 3. A being with an eye in the back of his head. 4. A postlude to the day's funeral march; a prelude to freedom.

Scandal: Gossip related by a small-bore.

Salvation: Redemption from a belief in miracles.

Scholar: 1. An ornate fossil. 2. A deadly ptomain that infests all forms of dynamic thought. 3. An impenetrable mass of matter that contains within itself the principle of unchangeability. 4. A turtle on whose shell is carved certain hieroglyphic lettering; such as, Ph. D., M. D., LL. D. 5. A medieval owl that roosts in universities, especially those that are endowed. 6. A plaster-of-Paris convolute. 7. A man, long on advice but short on action, who thinks he thinks. 8. One who draws his breath and salary. 9. Anybody with a bulging brow and no visible means of support.

Self-Reliance: The name we give to the egotism of the man who succeeds.

School: A training-place-mental, physical, moral. Good boys are boys at work. Bad boys are good boys who misdirect their energies.

Science: 1. The knowledge of the common people classified and carried one step further. 2. Accurate organized knowledge founded on fact. 3. Classified superstition.

Secret: 1. A thing we give to others to keep for us. 2. Something known only to a few.

Seer: The scout of civilization.

Self-Control: The ability to restrain a laugh at the wrong place.

Silence: A trick of the human gullet that conceals weakness or emptiness.

Sheeny: A Jew who has more money than you have.

Shoal: Shallow, literary, theological. (By extension, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and some other universities are sometimes called shoal-marks.)

Sincerity: 1. A mental attitude acquired after long practise by man, in order to conceal his ulterior motives. 2. To be childish, to be senile. 3. To lack invention, imagination or character. (A sincere man is one who bluffs only a part of the time.)

Sin: Perverted power. The man without capacity for sin has no ability to do good-isn't that so? His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither ameba nor fish, neither noxious bacilli nor useful life.

Servility: 1. The instinct of superiority in its lowest form. 2. The politician's virtue. 3. A means of getting on. 4. A natural law, the violation of which makes one famous and poor.

Sherman Act: A scheme to entrap men who set large numbers of people to work at employment profitable to everybody concerned.

Sober: 1. To be bored, unhappy, "all in." 2. To be born or live in Philadelphia. 3. To be without money, to be destitute. 4. To die. E. g., "Thank God, I am sober at last!" Dying words of Potodorus in Two Gentlemen of Yonkers.

Scotch: A verb meaning with care.

Self-Protection: The first law of life.

Socialist: 1. A person easily peeved. 2. In economics, a school of thought founded by Cain. 3. A man who, so far as he himself is concerned, considers a thing done when he has suggested it.

Smack: A crude, rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory substitute for a kiss.

Society: 1. An erotic clique that reads Vogue, Smart Set and Town Topics. 2. A congregation of people who are not persons. 3. A vast interchange of service through labor, ideas and commodities. 4. A relish for solitude.

Socialism: 1. A sincere, sentimental, beneficent theory, which has but one objection, and that is, it will not work. 2. A plan by which the inefficient, irresponsible, ineffective, unemployable and unworthy will thrive without industry, persistence or economy. 3. An earnest effort to get Nature to change the rules for the benefit of those who are tired of the Game. 4. A social and economic scheme of government by which man shall loiter rather than labor. 5. A survival of the unfit. 6. A device for swimming without going near the H2O.. 7. Participation in profits without responsibility as to deficits. 8. An arrangement for destroying initiative, invention, creation and originality. 9. Resolutions passed by a committee as a substitute for work. 10. A sentiment which encouraged and evolved would lead to revolution, with dynamiting and destruction as a prominent and recognized part of its propaganda. 11. A system for turning water into wine, kerosene into oyster-soup, and boulders into bread, by passing resolutions.

Sociology: The religious application of economics.

Sorrow: The magical palette upon which Life mixes her colors.

Slave: A person with a servile mind, who quickly crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning; who gratifies his wants either through cringing flattery or coercion, and who tyrannizes over others whenever he has a chance.

Specialist: 1. One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance, and gets further into a bog than the man ahead of him. 2. A kind of hypnotic trance wherein a person by centering his gaze on a given object renders the object smaller in proportion as his illusion grows.

Sorehead: A politician who has reached for something that was not his, and missed.

Solitude: The only thing that can hold the balance true.

Sorcerer: 1. Any one who can make the people of the United States believe they rule. 2. A juggler (hence the founder of any religious, political or philosophical system).

Specious: That form of argument used as an indoor sport by East Aurora natives in an attempt to prove that two or three make four.

Sorcery: The art of charming money out of the pockets of those who do not desire to part with it.

Spinsterhood: An achievement, not a disgrace.

Stall Stuff: 1. Things said to see what the other person will say. 2. The language used by politicians. 3. All conversation between spoons. Example: Seeing Mr. Jones leave his office, you enter and ask his stenographer this question: "Is Mr. Jones in?" (See Piffle, Pink Tea, Four o'Clock.)

Star: 1. A milestone in the Infinite. 2. A malicious, ironic eye. 3. A device to show man his insignificance.

Starvation: 1. The originator of thought. 2. A way to salvation. 3. A physical eccentricity of the stomach. 4. A cure for indigestion. 5. A banting process invented by Lazarus.

Specialization: The ability to focus all your energies on one thing.

Studio: 1. A place where a model is borne to blush unseen, and contract pneumonia in the chilly air. 2. A rendezvous of would-bes, has-beens and never-wazzers. 3. A place to study the esoteric. 4. The most polite term you can apply to it.

Stupidity: 1. The Utopia of the wise, the Lethe forbidden to the lips of genius. 2. The driving power of a Mass in motion. 3. An incurable state of somnambulism with which mankind is blessed, and under the spell of which it performs the most fantastic actions, such as marriage, balloting, warring, preaching, selling, buying, baptizing. 4. The leit-motif of the Vaudeville called Progressiveness.

Superstition: 1. Scrambled science flavored with fear. 2. Ossified metaphor.

Surgery: An adjunct, more or less valuable to the diagnostician.

Style: 1. The brogue of the mind. 2. A certain manner or deportment which emanates from those who have neither manner nor deportment. 3. A peculiar and individual manner of doing the unnecessary.

Subsidiary: A competitor who has come off his perch through threats or bribes, or both.

Success: 1. A sunset by Turner. 2. A stained-glass window through which one may see an ironic moon. 3. The final link in a chain of chalk. 4. To rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession. 5. An inability to further fletcherize. 6. Giving up the fight, being possessed of the fallacy that you have won. 7. Death's lullaby. 8. The accomplishment of one's best. 9. To write your name high upon the outhouse of a country tavern. 10. A constant sense of discontent, broken by brief periods of satisfaction on doing some specially good piece of work. 11. A matter of outliving your sins. 12. A subtle connivance of Nature for bringing about a man's defeat. 13. The realization of the estimate which you place upon yourself. 14. Voltage under control-keeping one hand on the transformer of your Kosmic Kilowatts. 15. A matter of the red corpuscle. 16. The thing that spoils many a good failure. 17. Something that is hideous to all but its victims.

Suction: An automatic, murderous and perpetual movement of Society against each individual.

Supernatural: The natural not yet understood.

Sun: 1. A giant spot-light, which from the wings of space plays intermittently upon a meaningless ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville show. 2. The root of all evil, the mother of all beauty, and the final tomb of all that is good, bad or indifferent. 3. A dyehouse, probably the first. (The sun was once worshiped as a divinity, but later the competition between gods and divinities became so strenuous that the sun was forgotten, hence his casual earthquakes, floods and other little reminders that we and our gods are only his gimcracks.)

Statute: The proof, record and final justification of the infallibility of Ignorance.

Strong Man: One who busies himself with the useful tasks that others can not, or will not do, and allows those who can do nothing else to do the easy things.

Sympathy: 1. A malady that sometimes afflicts the rich. 2. The lees of the wine-cup offered to another. 3. An impulse toward ourselves through the heart of another. 4. Whatever may be extended to another that does not take the shape of money. 5. The sum of all virtues. 6. The first attribute of love as well as its last. (I am not sure but that sympathy is love's own self, vitalized mayhap by some divine actinic ray. Only the souls who have suffered are well loved.)