The Roycroft Dictionary

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ROYCROFT: 1. Roy means "king"; and croft means "home or craft." Thus, Roycroft means King-Craft; working for the highest; doing your work just as good as you can-making things for the King. 2. The dignity and the divinity of labor-peace, reciprocity, health, industry, persistency and endurance.

Relaxation: The first requirement of strength.

Reciprocity: 1. The act of seconding the emotion. 2. A widow teaching a clergyman how to tango, in return for his kindness in having shown her how to swim.

Race Problem: Picking the winner.

Recipe: 1. Work, smile, study, play, love-Mix. 2. Concentrate, Consecrate, Work.

Redeemer: 1. A man who died that grafters might live. 2. An Oriental who would have forgiven Hiram Johnson. 3. The founder of a great trust, with headquarters in the Vatican. 4. Any one who consorts with the underworld, but who spends his vacation after death in the upper world. 5. In the Catholic Church the Man Higher Up, to whom the Pope plays Jack Rose. 6. One who saved the whole world, but who had himself damned for his pains. E. g., First Citizen: "Christ was a myth." Second Citizen: "He was not!" (Then they murder each other in His Name.)

Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions.

Religion: Philosophy touched with emotion.

Railroads: The most important factor for progress and enlightenment in the world today.

Renunciation: The act of giving up your seat in a street-car to a pretty woman, and then purposely stepping on an old man's toes.

Reformer: 1. One who causes the rich to band themselves against the poor. 2. One who educates the people to appreciate the things they need.

Region: A specific, definite space, as distinguished from any other specific, definite space; as, East Aurora, Barren Island, Kalamazoo, Sea Grit, Beverly.

Repartee: Any remark which is so clever that it makes the listener wish he had said it himself.

Resignation: 1. A truce with ourselves in order to give us time to bury our living. 2. Pride walling itself up. 3. To keep shop without a show-window. 4. To go to sleep in the lap of the inevitable. 5. A covered walk to the interior of ourselves; a subway to some other form of trespass; a peephole into the enemy's fortress. 6. To play possum when one hears the footfall of Fate on the stairs.

Reputation: A bubble which a man bursts when he tries to blow it for himself.

Resurrection: The hypothetical New-Year's Day in the calendar of the dead.

Remorse: That feeling which we all have when the thing fails to work, and the world knows it. The form that failure takes when it has made a grab and got nothing.

Respectability: The dickey on the bosom of civilization.

Romance: Where the hero begins by deceiving himself and ends by deceiving others.

Righteous Indignation: 1. Hate that scorches like hell, but which the possessor thinks proves he is right. 2. Your own wrath as opposed to the shocking bad temper of others.

Righteousness: 1. Only a form of commonsense. 2. Wise expediency.

Revival: Religion with a vaudeville attachment.

Roosevelt (Theodore): A harangue-outang.

Ruins: 1. The hope of the ancient yesterday. 2. Absolute proof that the world of dreams, like the planet earth, is round. (Ruins are chiefly notable for the number of enlightened liars, called archeologists, they produce.)