The Roycroft Dictionary

P

PAIN: 1. The sacred, immanent music of the Cosmos written in slow triple time. 2. A form of salvation invented by Christianity. 3. A beautiful and ecstatic state wherein one comes to a realization of the benevolence of the Almighty.

Paradise: 1. A place where one is permitted to continue one's vices, excesses and inanities for an eternity. 2. A postmortem rake-off. 3. Any place from which one can see a friend in Hell. 4. One good telephone system. (Christians, Mohammedans and Billysundays have promised themselves a cheerful time after death; this they call Paradise. The Jews are the only people who have no Paradise beyond the tomb; this is easily explained when it is remembered that they own New York.)

Parody: A calico cat stuffed with cotton.

Parvenu: One who has risen suddenly from nothing and becomes nothing suddenly.

Peace: A monotonous interval between fights.

Pedant: A person with more education than he can use.

Performer: One who has a right to do troglodyte stunts and who can do something else.

Perfume: Any smell that is used to down a worse one.

Philosophy: Our highest conception of life, its duties and its destinies.

Politicians: 1. Men who volunteer the task of governing us for a consideration. 2. See Graftheimer.

Pericles: See Aspasia.

Pessimist: 1. One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist. 2. The official vinegar-taster to Setebos.

Piety: 1. The tinfoil of pretense. 2. That feeling of reverence we have toward the Almighty on account of His supposed resemblance to ourselves.

Publisher: 1. An emunctory business, first functioned by Barabbas. 2. One of a band of panders which sprang into existence soon after the death of Gutenberg and which now overruns the world. 3. The patron saint of the mediocre.

Poet: 1. A person born with the instinct to poverty. 2. One whose ideas of the beautiful and the sublime get him in jail or Potter's Field. 3. The patron saint of landlords. 4. A worthless, shiftless chap whose songs adorn the libraries of fat shopkeepers and paunchy Philistines one hundred years after the chap has died of malnutrition. 5. A dope-fiend.

Poetry: 1. A substitute for the impossible. 2. The bill and coo of s*x.

Platonic Love: The only kind that is blind. It never knows where it is going to fetch up.

Planet: A planet is a large body of matter entirely surrounded by a void, as distinguished from a clergyman, who is a large void entirely surrounded by matter.

Play: A wise method of Nature which prevents one's nerves from setting on the outside of his Stein-Bloch.

Pocket: The seat of the human soul.

Police: Similia similibus.

Policy: Leaving a few things unsaid.

Politeness: 1. The screen of language; the irony of civility; a fishing-rod. 2. A substitute for war. 3. To wipe your feet carefully on the common doormat before letting yourself in another's premises with a skeleton key. 4. Caliban in a boiled shirt, tuxedo and spats. (Politeness in the animal world is known after eating only; in the human world it is known both before and after eating, and, in a certain restricted circle, during eating.)

Prayer: A supplication intended for the person who prays. Only very dull people doubt its efficacy.

Prig: A person with more money than he needs.

Preacher: 1. Mendicancy in a celluloid collar. 2. A man who advises others concerning things about which he knows nothing. 3. Any man who lives on six hundred dollars a year and only works orally. 4. (Now obsolete) One who makes pastoral calls, frightens the young, astonishes the old, bothers the busy, and serves disappointed females as vicarious lover, father, friend, and personal representative of Deity.

Practical Politics: The glad hand, and a swift kick in the pants.

Principle: 1. Bait. 2. A formula for doing a thing that, unformulated, would land the doer in jail. (Must not be confused with the word principal. Both words are used correctly in the following sentence: One may live one's life without principle, but not without principal. Or, again, Principle is sometimes principal; but principal has no principle. Or, The principal was never paid on principle.)

Prosecutor: 1. One who abets a crime after it has or has not been committed. 2. An oratorical censor that precedes the coming of the hangman. 3. A pumice-stone that gives to the Statue of Justice a cleanly, Christian look. 4. A nose that can sniff the gallows, long before the wood is cut for it in the forest.

Postponement: The father of failure.

Prison: 1. A place where any lady may have a baby without fearing society. 2. An institution where even crooks go wrong. 3. The House of a Thousand Tears. 4. The last resort of the obscure to achieve fame. 5. A banker's mess-hall. 6. A place where men go to take the vow of chastity, poverty and obedience. 7. An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.

Protestantism: 1. A splinter from the cross of Christ. 2. Acrobatic theologic mugwumpery. 3. Any one of fifty-seven varieties of hate. 4. Sects which have taken the petticoats off of the saints and put them on their pastors.

Progress: Getting free from theology, and substituting psychology instead.

Progressive: 1. A politician who wears his opinions pompadour. 2. An obstructionist who grows fat on conservatism and conversation. 3. A reactionary to whom movement and motion are necessary in order to keep warm, and secure gulps and guzzles. 4. A hungry or unsuccessful person; hence, an explosive, quixotic fellow with empty pockets and a shallow pate. 5. One who has felt the slings and arrows of outrageous success that has come to others. 6. A political piker, who will not play the game according to the rules which he himself devised. 7. One who would recall all decisions that do not uphold his claims. 8. A man who steals a label, and clapping it on himself, thinks that he is It. 9. A plan for going forward by backing up to mob rule. (The first Progressive of whom we know was Judas. The next was Ananias. Lazarus was a Progressive, and had he married the Queen of Sheba he would have changed places with Dives. E. g., "This age belongs to the Progressives."-From Kazook's Confessions of a Popular Lick-Spittle.)

Purgatory: Two telephone systems in one town.

Prosperity: 1. That peculiar condition which excites the lively interest of the ambulance-chaser. 2. That which comes about when men believe in other men. 3. That condition which attracts the lively interest of lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages or indicted, or both.

Polygamy: An endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it.

Psychology: The science of human minds and their relationship one to another.

Public Opinion: The judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of the discerning few.

Punishment: 1. The justice that the guilty deal out to those who are caught. 2. A perpetual fine, imposed hourly during the lifetime of a human being for his temerity in living, and continued in Heaven or Hell for his temerity in dying. 3. Among the poor and lowly, a service due the State for disobeying the mandates of the rich and powerful; among the rich, a slight reaction from overeating. (There are three kinds of punishment: the punishment of God, the punishment of man, and the punishment of living in Buffalo.)

Popularity: The triumph of the commonplace.

Prophets: The advance couriers of Time.

Purity: 1. A rapt, interested and ecstatic aloofness toward natural processes. 2. A sewerage system that carries off everything, leaving the soul perfectly bald. 3. A condition of the mind that causes one to snoop around in garbage-dumps and start a league. 4. A plan of teaching things to children in which they are not interested. 5. An ethereal nose giving the miraculous power of sensing the lavatory in the Elysian Fields before it smells the flowers. (There is purity of mind, purity of body and purity of speech. Any one person endowed with all three of these modes or purity is blessed, elect, saved, or otherwise atrophied and pickled.)

Pharisee: A man with more religion than he knows what to do with.

Philistine: A term of reproach used by prigs to designate certain people they do not like.

Philosopher: One who thinks in order to believe; one who formulates his prejudices and systematizes his ignorance.