The Roycroft Dictionary

O

OBEDIENCE: 1. Expectation on a monument. 2. A dignified retreat from Balaklava. 3. Lex Talionis playing 'possum. 4. The second law of Nature, the first being murder. E. g., "After all, it was my brother's Obedience to the Lord that laid the foundation of my glory."-From Cain's Diary of an Altar-Wrecker.

Opportunity: 1. The only Knocker that is welcome. 2. Health and a job.

Oblivion: 1. The memory of Eternity. 2. A place where the human race and politicians are as one; where immortals are afflicted with aphasia; where God enjoys a long siesta; where we lose the bores and all those good folks who want to tell us the sad story of their lives.

Old Maid: A lady of uncertain age and uneasy virtue.

Opera: 1. Forerunner of the phonograph. 2. A rendezvous for the bored.

Optimism: 1. The instinct to lie. 2. Fatty degeneration of intelligence. 3. A philosophical system that attempts to demonstrate the existence of a pre-established Stupidity. 4. To believe that disease, dirt, earthquakes, fires, wars, politicians, blindness, and burial alive, celebrate and enhance the Glory of God. 5. To whistle while passing a cemetery in the night; to sing a hymn while having a tooth pulled; to smile while being robbed. 6. A tipple invented by Leigh Mitchell Hodges, the basis of which is clams and prune juice. 7. A kind of heart stimulant-the digitalis of failure.

Orthodoxy: 1. In religion, that state of mind which congratulates itself on being absolutely right, and a belief that all who think otherwise are wholly wrong. 2. A faith in the fixed-a worship of the static. 3. The joy that comes from thinking that most everybody is lined up for Limbus with no return ticket. 4. A condition brought about by the sprites of Humor, according to the rule that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. 5. The zenith of selfishness and the nadir of egotism. 6. Mephisto with a lily in his hand. 7. A corpse that does not know it is dead. 8. Spiritual constipation. 9. That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea or absorb a new one.

Organized Religion: Antique philosophy, or the rule of the priest.

Obstinacy: 1. To stick to your favorite lie or truth because you know you are wrong in either case. 2. The ego's peacock-plumes.

Optimist: 1. A neurotic person with gooseflesh, and teeth a-chatter, trying hard to be brave. 2. A man who when he falls in the soup thinks of himself as being in the swim. 3. A man who does not care what happens, so long as it doesn't happen to him.

Oratory: 1. Chin-music with Prince Albert accompaniment. 2. The lullaby of the Intellect. 3. Palaver in a Prince Albert.

Orient: 1. The subconscious part of the Occident. 2. The cradle of all infamies and all wisdom. 3. A place where God and the house have an esoteric meaning.