The Wickedictionary

The name Wickedictionary is intended to be a play on the word Wiktionary. The idea is to collect definitions of words like in a dictionary, except the definitions must be perverse in the style of Ambrose Bierce's the Devil's Dictionary. The idea is to modernize Ambrose Bierce and come up with a more contemporary and cutting-edge collection of definitions. Anyone is welcome to contribute to this page. If anyone can help me fill in missing sources that would be great. You are welcome to email me definitions. You can make up you own or you can send me existing ones with relevant citations. If it makes me smile, I'll include it.

Basically any definition that has a surprise twist qualifies for entry here, whether it happens to be cynical or not. The idea is we don't have to necessarily agree with these definitions, but to merely enjoy them for making us think. As Aristotle once said, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

A

Abstract art: n. a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Absurdity: n. a statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Academia: n. a chronic disease characterized by a compulsion to write lengthy specialized treatises in unintelligible vocabularies, for the purpose of rising in the esteem of those similarly afflicted.

Accountant: n. a dutiful book-balancer whose role within a corporation is to protect if from creative ideas.

Actor: n. a professional exhibitionist who manufactures emotions in a manner convincing enough to earn a living.

Addict: n. a hobbyist with commitment.

Advertising: n. is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.

Agnostic: n. one whose extreme skepticism even keeps them from being an atheist.

Alimony: n. is like buying hay for a dead horse.

Ambition: n. is the last refuge of the failure.

Appeaser: n. is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.

Art: n. 1. is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Art: n. 2. is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Art: n. 3. is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Art: n. 4. is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Artist: n. is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Assassination: n. is the extreme form of censorship.

Assonance: n. a rhyme that has gone wrong.

Atheism: n. 1. one's God-given right to not believe.

Atheism: n. 2. a godless religion that retains all the dogmatic posturing of the faiths it so confidently denies, with few of the consolations.

Atheist: n. 1. the ultimate gambler.

Atheist: n. 2. someone who's all dressed up with no place to go after death.

Atheist: n. 3. one who requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Atheist: n. 4. one with blind faith in a mistaken belief that the absence of evidence against a null hypothesis confirms it.

Atheist: n. 5. a person who believes in one less god than you do.

Atheist: n. 6. a man who believes himself to be an accident.

Atheist: n. 7. a person who dines at a lavish banquet, believing there is no kitchen, no waste chute, nor chef.

B

Backlash: n. the equal and opposite reaction to actions on behalf of women, minorities, political correctness, jogging, spotted owls, oat bran and other timely causes, sometimes legitimate, that have been marketed to the public with fatally obnoxious zeal.

Bank: n. a place where money automatically increases in value, especially when we need to borrow some.

Banker: n. one who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Bartender: n. a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

Bigotry: n. that which tries to keep truth safe in a grip so tight that kills it.

Birthday: n. the unique celebration of being one Earth's orbit closer to death.

Blogs: n. proof that infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters will only produce grammatically-incorrect, self-indulgent ramblings.

Bookcase: n. a piece of furniture used in America to house bowling trophies and Elvis collectibles.

Bore: n. 1. a person who talks when you wish him to listen.

Bore: n. 2. a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Bore: n. 3. a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.

Boss: n. 1. someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.

Boss: n. 2. a personal dictator appointed to those of us fortunate enough to live in free societies.

Bride: n. a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

Broadsheet newspaper: n. a device for helping fools to feel superior.

C

Canberra: n. a lost opportunity to toss a coin between Melbourne and Sydney. Can also be used as the exemplar for determining shades of grey.

Catholicism: n. a powerful multilateral platform working under the ill-informed belief of its own righteousness. Noted for use of effective group think methodologies spanning from 11th Century to 19th Century in order to sustain power and control. See Inquisition.

Canonization: n. a posthumous elevation to sainthood; a state of grace attained by religious leaders through miracles, by politicians via assassination, and by rock stars as a result of a timely drug overdose.

Capital punishment: n. the controversial right of the state to end a life by gassing, shooting, hanging, needling or quick-frying; believed effective as a deterrent to future crimes by the same individual.

Celebrity: n. someone who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

Celibacy: n. a respite from the pleasures and perils of sexual congress; a way of life traditionally practiced by Catholic priests, monks, Shakers, stamp collectors, overly zealous careerists, Star Trek fans, hermits, and amoebas.

Censor: n. a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Chess: n. is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

Cinnamon: n. sawdust.

Civilization: n. is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Comedy: n. is simply a funny way of being serious.

Committee: n. 1. individuals who can do nothing individually and sit and decide that nothing can be done together.

Committee: n. 2. a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.

Common sense: n. is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.

Compromise: n. the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he got the bigger piece.

Conference: n. the confusion of one person multiplied by the number present.

Conference room: n. a place where everyone talks, no one listens, and everyone disagrees later.

Congratulation: n. the civility of envy.

Conscience: n. the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Conservative: n. 1. one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Conservative: n. 2. a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

Consistency: n. 1. is the last refuge of the imaginative.

Consistency: n. 2. is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

Consultant: n. a jobless person who shows executives how to work.

Corporation: n. an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Creativity: n. 1. is knowing how to hide your sources.

Creativity: n. 2. is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Critic: n. one who searches for ages for the wrong word, which, to give due credit, is eventually found.”

Criticism: n. is prejudice made plausible.

Cubicle: n. a sensory deprivation chamber designed to boost productivity in the workplace, at least according to people who work in corner offices with large windows.

Cubism: n. is where the laws of perspective have been repealed.

Cult film: n. a movie seen about fifty times by about that many people.

Cynic: n. 1. a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Cynic: n. 2. is what an idealist calls a realist.

Cynic: n. 3. a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Cynic: n. 4. an idealist who's rose-coloured glasses have been removed, snapped in two, and stomped into the ground immediately improving his vision.

Cynic: n. 5. a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.

Cynicism: n. the fine art of expressing the truth without its pants on.

D

Dating: t.v. an elaborate prelude to mating that fulfills much the same function as the sniffing ritual in dogs, but without its forthright honesty.

Die: v. to stop sinning suddenly.

Defence: n. an illusion of security for the public, not the enemy.

Democracy: n. 1. the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Democracy: n. 2. is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy: n. 3. is the pathetic belief in the wisdom of collective ignorance.

Democracy: n. 4. is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Democracy: n. 5. is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Democracy: n. 6. true democracy is that one moron is equal to one genius.

Denial: n. that which keeps an optimist from becoming a pessimist.

Diplomat: n. a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.

Divorce: n. 1. is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.

Divorce: n. 2. from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet.

Divorce: n. 3. the future tense of marriage.

Do-gooder: n. one with no time to be good, as he is too busy doing good

Dotcom: n. a valiant online enterprise that typically favors coolness over profitability; for this reason, esp. following the Crash of 2000, now commonly referred to by traumatized investors as a 'dotbomb.'

Doubt: n. 1. is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

Doubt: n. 2. that which grows with knowledge.

Doubt: n. 3. is an absolute certainty in the belief that nothing is black and white

E

Economic sanctions: n. a welcomed ticket for a dictator to stir up internal patriotism that gives him carte blanche to exert a tighter stranglehold on his regime.

Economist: n. an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Edgy: n. sufficiently abrasive and obnoxious to captivate an urban audience.

Editor: n. in the publishing industry, a diligent intellectual drudge condemned to a lifetime of embarrassingly meagre pay, so that multi-thousand-dollar contracts might be awarded to semi-literate celebrities for their ghost-written memoirs.

Education: n. 1. is the thing that interferes with learning.

Education: n. 2. a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Egoist: n. person of low taste, more interested in themselves than in me.

Egotism: n. is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.

Election: n. a democratic ritual carried out in order to check if the polls were right.

Electricity: n. is really just organized lightning.

Enemy: n. 1. a fiction abroad to distract us from domestic reality.

Enemy: n. 2. is anyone who tells the truth about you.

Entrepreneur: n. one who satisfies his own material cravings by catering to those of the public.

Ethics: n. 1. an unspoken code of decency that once governed most business and professional transactions, at least theoretically.

Ethics: n. 2. a fluctuating commodity that declines in direct proportion to the amount of money at stake.

Etiquette: n. a social code devised and memorized by members of the upper classes for the purpose of screening out raffish pretenders to their ranks.

Euthanasia: n. the art of persuading elderly loaded relatives to bring their wills into effect.

Exaggeration: n. is truth that has lost its temper.

Excuse: n. 1. is a perfectly good reason that has been rejected by those in authority.

Excuse: n. 2. the mark of a moral coward.

Experience: n. is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Experiment: n. the fine art of fudging scientific data so that they mesh with one's original hypothesis.

Expert: n. 1. a person sufficiently jaded with all the facts that he declares when something cannot be done.

Expert: n. 2. a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

Expert: n. 3. a person who is more than 50 miles from home, has no responsibility for implementing the advice he gives, and shows slides.

Explanation: n. is condensed descriptions.

F

Fact: n. a folly committed by enough of the right people to confer on it the badge of status.

Factionalism: n. the abiding human need to create group conflicts based on religion, politics, race, gender, class or whether toilet paper should be pulled over or under the roll.

Faith: n. 1. an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Faith: n. 2. is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

Faith: n. 3. is our normal mode of operation, until we punctuate it with odd moments of reason.

Fashion: n. a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Fatherhood: n. is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

Federal budget: n. in the U.S., a miraculous machine that continually cranks out more money than it takes in; unfortunately not yet licensed for use in the home.

Feminism: n. 1. is complaining about the male representation of God, whilst overlooking the male representation of the devil. This selectivity extends to altering moot words such as 'chairman' and 'mankind', whilst rather cunningly retaining 'henchman' and 'manslaughter'.

Feminism: n. 2. a movement created to allow ugly women access to the mainstream of society.

Feminism: n. 3. a militant over-reaction to a historically male narrative.

Feminist: n. a woman who intends to fulfil her destiny by aping the worst traits of her oppressors.

Finance: n. the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.

Fishing: n. a venerable contest in which modern man pits his intelligence and technology against the native wit of primitive aquatic vertebrates, and generally finishes second.

Flying: a. is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Food: n. an important part of a balanced diet.

Food chain: n. the vast hierarchy of predators, with plankton at the bottom and marketing executives at the top.

Freedom: n. 1. in the U.S., the sacred right to speak and act according to one's conscience, except when dealing with sensitive special-interest groups or militant Republican administrations.

Freedom: n. 2. what the U.S. frequently exports to developing nations, by force if necessary.

Friend: n. 1. is one who knows all about you, and still likes you.

Friend: n. 2. is not necessarily one of the people you like best, but merely one of those who got there first.

Fundamentalist: n. a person self-imprisoned on a railway platform, who missed the train of life whilst arguing over really important things such as different interpretations of the station timetable.

G

Gambling: n. a tax on the mathematically impaired.

Genealogy: n. an account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.

Gentleman: n. formerly the male exemplar of honour, nobility and other behavioural relics from the Age of Chivalry; now dismissed as someone with a testosterone deficiency.

Good judgment: n. that which comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

Gym: n. a sacred modern temple of self-flagellation that extends one's lifespan for more of the same.

H

Hard work: n. is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

Happiness: n. 1. an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Happiness: n. 2. a form of self-denial about the future, due to an exaggerated sense of satisfaction about the present.

Health: n. a delicate equilibrium that may be upset by smoking too many cigarettes or reading too many alarming medical studies.

Health food: n. a family of bland, marginally edible grains, beans, sprouts and other vegetative matter that presumably fortifies the body as effectively as it wilts the spirit.

Hell: n. 1. a perpetual holiday.

Hell: n. 2. Italian punctuality, German humour, and English wine.

Hero: n. someone who is talented at getting other people killed.

Herpes: n. the affliction of a latter-day leper, rendering the victim untouchable except by fellow sufferers, who must then spend their lives searching for each other like fireflies in the twilight.

High street: n. a generally imposing thoroughfare running through a district of empty shop fronts.

Hip: adj. smartly attuned to the latest cutting-edge cliches.

History: n. 1. a fable agreed upon.

History: n. 2. an account of events written down by the winners.

Homophobe: n. someone who projects his own self-hate onto those that are not in self-denial.

Hope: n. is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.

Hotel: n. a refuge from home life.

Human: n. a minor bipedal life form extant on a squalid little planet named Earth, in a backwater little-known galaxy; they are also known as 'Earthlings'. Humans are characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-entitlement, display a collective form of narcissistic personality disorder, and are generally regarded as the rednecks of the universe. Their problems appear to stem from a disingenuous form of business transaction they call 'land ownership.' They are at a primitive stage of development, thankfully can only sense 3-dimensions, and so are unaware of the rest of us. They are generally thought to be of no threat to the Federation of Planets, as by the time they figure out how to communicate with higher dimensions they will have annihilated themselves anyway. The Federation has blacklisted them as pariahs of the universe and so all funding for academic study of these obnoxious creatures has been suspended for 10 million years or until when their petty factious behaviour ceases, whichever comes soonest.

Human: n. one who is almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, but also remarkable for the apparent disinclination to do so.

Humour: n. 1. an almost physiological response to fear.

Humour: n. 2. a way of holding off how awful life can be.

Hypocrisy: n. is the vaseline of social intercourse.

I

Illegal immigrant: n. a hapless foreigner who peacefully enters a country with the noble purpose of propping up its economy, by performing all the jobs that local inhabitants refuse to do, thereby sacrificing himself for the greater good; as opposed to a blood thirsty foreign warlord who rapes, pillages, and dominates a country, who with his descendants then gets disingenuously elevated to 'ruling class' status.

Imitation: n. is the sincerest form of flattery.

Impossibility: n. that which often has a kind of integrity to it, which the merely improbable lacks.

Insanity: n. 1. is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.

Insanity: n. 2. is inflation of the ego to its ultimate.

International relations: n. a questionable view held by a sovereign state that they relate to another sovereign state in a sophisticated and meaningful manner.

Internet: n. the most sophisticated technological network ever created, able to link the sum of the world's knowledge and used to share funny pictures of cats.

Intuition: n. is a suspension of logic due to impatience.

J

Judge: n. is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

Jury: n. 1. a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Jury: n. 2. a panel of amateurs called upon to decide life-or-death matters in court.

Just war: n. the theory that nine of Ten Commandments are inviolate, but that one can be selective when it comes to killing. Under this theory, beliefs in 'just theft' or 'just adultery,' for example, are punishable by hanging or lethal injection.

K

Kill: v.t. to create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

Kleptomaniac: n. one who steals for pleasure rather than material gain; a thief with breeding.

L

Language: n. 1. a tool for concealing the truth.

Language: n. 2. that which man invented to satisfy his deep need to complain.

Law: n. is that which in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Lawyer: n. 1. is one who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.

Lawyer: n. 2. personal advocate hired to bend the law on behalf of a paying client; for this reason considered the most suitable background for entry into politics.

Lesbianism: n. a double jeopardy relationship where both parties argue under the influence of PMS.

Liberty: n. the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Lie: n. an epistemological problem.

Life: n. 1. is a sexually transmitted disease and invariably fatal.

Life: n. 2. is what kills you in the end.

Life: n. 3. is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Life insurance: n. a contract that keeps you poor all your life so that you can die rich.

Literature: n. an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.

Logic: n. the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Loser: n. a highly successfully person who impeccably lives up to measures not sanctioned by the majority.

Love: 1. n. is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Love: 2. n. is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Love: 3. n. is a temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Luck: n. the explanation for success of those we don't like.

M

Management: n. a class of semi-skilled corporate hirelings whose rise within the organization correlates directly with the amount of work they delegate to their more talented underlings.

Management consultancy: n. a highly effective and legally permissible confidence trick.

Mathematical proof: n. is the demonstration that a proposition is correct with a level of certainty that at least two mathematicians somewhere in the world understand it.

Marriage: n. 1. is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Marriage: n. 2. is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

Marriage: n. 3. is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.

Marriage: n. 4. is when a woman exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.

Marriage: n. 5. is the chief cause of divorce.

Marriage: n. 6. a situation where a man loses his bachelor's degree and a woman gains her masters.

Martial arts: n. a family of Asiatic self-defense disciplines consisting largely of sweeping ornamental gestures of the arms and legs; amusing to look at but disappointingly ineffective when one's opponent is armed with a semi-automatic.

Martyrdom: n. is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Maturity: n. is a state we reach the day we don't need to be lied to about anything.

Metaphysics: n. is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Military action: n. an ultimate gift to a regime that gives it what its hardliners were actively seek to provoke in order to unify their own internal divisions.

Military intelligence: n. a contradiction in terms.

Military justice: n. is to justice what military music is to music.

Misogynist: n. a man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Mission statement: n. a corporate creed passed on to employees so they can remember why they’re skipping lunch.

Monogamy: n. bigamy is having a wife too many, monogamy is the same.

Motivation: n. the point reached by individuals when they have put off everything else, including procrastination.

Multilateralism: n. 1. an attempt to create polite mob rule.

Multilateralism: n. 2. a useful form of employment for surplus public servants who wish to live in Paris.

Mythology: n. the early primitive beliefs of a society, as opposed to the real account that it invents later.

N

Nation: n. a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

Nationalism: n. the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad."

Neighbour: n. one whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.

Nerd: n. a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones.

Newspaper: n. a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

Nominee: n. a modest person shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the dishonorable obscurity of public office.

Normal: n. is the average of deviance.

Notoriety: n. the fame of one's competitor.

Novel: n. a well-padded short story.

Nuclear power station: n. an economical way of creating a nuclear weapons infrastructure, at the expense of uneconomical electricity for the masses.

Nuclear war: n. that in which all men are cremated equal.

O

Obvious: n. that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

Office: n. a place where you relax after your strenuous home life.

Old age: n. when regrets take the place of dreams.

Online: n. offlife.

Opportunity: n. that which comes brilliantly disguised as an insoluble problem.

Optimism: n. is inevitably the last hope of the defeated.

Optimist: n. 1. one who believes the inevitable will be postponed.

Optimist: n. 2. one who has never had much experience.

Optimist: n. 3. one who doesn't have the patience to worry.

Oratory: n. a conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding.

Originality: n. the art of concealing one's sources.

Orthodoxy: n. is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.

P

Paradox: n. 1. a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be.'

Paradox: n. 2. a paradox is nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Patience: n. a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

Patriotism: n. 1. is the virtue of the vicious.

Patriotism: n. 2. is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

Patriotism: n. 3. is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Patriotism: n. 4. is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

Patriotism: n. 5. is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

Patriotism: n. 6. a dreadful indignity whereby a soul is controlled by geography.

Perplexity: n. is the beginning of knowledge.

Philosopher: n. a fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.

Philosophy: n. a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Photograph: n. a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Plagiarism: n. a literary coincidence where an honorable work is faced with a discreditable priority.

Plastic surgeon: n. a modern high-priest of vanity who offers redemption via a scalpel blade.

Polygamy: n. an act of supreme sacrifice where a man risks his life to more than one mother-in-law.

Politeness: n. the most acceptable hypocrisy.

Political correctness: n. 1. is the ceasing of cognitive abilities relating to rational analysis; often mistaken for religious fundamentalism and/or group think.

Political correctness: n. 2. a loss of ability to confront reality in all its diversity. Diversity is instead replaced by an unanimity of meaninglessness.

Politician: n. 1. a person with the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and has the ability afterward to explain why it didn't happen.

Politician: n. 2. one who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence after.

Politician: n. 3. a politician is one who thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Politics: n. 1. a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Politics: n. 2. a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.

Politics: n. 3. is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

Pornography: n. 1. erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.

Pornography: n. 2. the truest form of pornography is seeing beauty in war.

Prostitution: n. a business transaction where one's body is hired out at a much greater price than for what people commonly sell their souls for in a lifetime.

Pray: v. to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Prescription: n. a physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Present: n. an illusory state between immediate past and immediate future.

Prig: n a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

Professional: n. 1. in personal ads, the most desirable sort of potential mate. 2. In the streets, a prostitute. 3. In the business world, see definition #2.

Prophecy: n. the art of selling one's credibility for future delivery.

Puritanism: n. is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Q

Quorum: n. a sufficient number of members of a group to have their own way.

R

Reality: n. 1. is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Reality: n. 2. is an illusion caused by the lack of drugs.

Reality: n. 3. that which very few people have the imagination for.

Reconsider: v. to seek justification for a decision already made.

Religion: n. 1. is the sincere belief that a supreme being has the slightest bit of interest in supremely anthropocentric rituals.

Religion: n. 2. is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Remorse: n. regret that one waited so long to do it.

Republican: n. in the US, a creature that remains after all humanity is removed from a politician.

Research: n. if you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.

Resolute: adj. obstinate in an approved manner.

S

Scandal: n. that which ruins an unpopular official and causes a popular one to enjoy an even higher approval rating.

Schizophrenia: n. a healthy response to a sick society.

Science: n. 1. is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Science: n. 2. is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Science: n. 3. is the road to pertinent answers, found by asking impertinent questions.

Self: n. is that which is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

Selfish: adj. devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

Selfishness: n. is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Self-respect: n. is the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Semicolon: n. a transvestite hermaphrodite representing absolutely nothing. All it does is show you've been to college.

Sex: n. is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

Silence: n. is the perfect expression of scorn.

Socialism: n. is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Star: n. a performer who makes more than his or her agent.

Statistician: n. a man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Subtlety: n. the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood.

Success: n. 1. is the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.

Success: n. 2. is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Success: n. 3. is when a man makes more money than his wife can spend.

Superstition: n. 1. is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

Superstition: n. 2. is a belief which leaves no place for doubt.

Sustainable growth: n. a cheeky little oxymoron suggesting the idea of economic growth that is sustainable over vast ecological time scales; where in practice this is often the time period required to just make it through to the next election.

T

Tabloid: n. a compact journal filled with tall tales of celebrity infidelities, woes, gaffes, feuds and diseases, so as to minimize mass resentment of their undeserved fame and wealth.

Talk show: n. an opportunity for people to confess to millions of viewers what they would be ashamed to admit to their next-door neighbors.

Team player: n. the type of cooperative, self-effacing employee beloved by corporations that promote egotists to the top positions.

Technology: n. 1. is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.

Technology: n. 2. the means by which today's forward-looking companies produce tomorrow's obsolete gadgets.

Thief: n. a petty thief is one you hang, but a truly great thief is one you appoint to public office.

Theology: n. 1. is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.

Theology: n. 2. is the recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

Time: n. 1. is what stops everything from happening all at once.

Time: n. 2. is that which wounds all heels.

Tolerance: n. is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Truth: n. 1. is that which begins as a blasphemy.

U

UFO: n. a result of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Ugliness: n. a gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.

Utimatum: n. in diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.

V

Veneer: n. a thin, finely finished exterior that effectively conceals the underlying substance; e.g., a mortician's smile or the civility that prevails at a Hollywood party.

Video Camera: n. an audiovisual recording device thrust into the hands of the public so that future social historians might develop migraines looking at our school plays, pet tricks, weddings, and christenings.

Video Game: n. an electronic form of opium, consumed by stony-eyed young addicts either at home or in dark communal dens, where their families occasionally must venture to retrieve them.

W

War: n. 1. is where truth is the first casualty.

War: n. 2. is young men dying and old men talking.

War: n. 3. is an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

War: n. 4. a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

War: n. 5. a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Wealth: n. any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

Wedding: n. similar to a funeral except that you get to smell your own flowers.

Wedding ring: n. a subtle signal to single admirers that they should abandon all hope, since the wearer already has.

Welfare: n. a public safety net strung up to catch the casualties of the free market system and keep them tangled in the webbing for generations.

Wickedictionary: n. the product of an unholy alliance between Ambrose Bierce and Derek Abbott resulting in an obscene collection of twisted definitions that perversely expose the truth.

Wikipedia: n. the world's most accurate encyclopedia [citation needed].

Women: n. those which have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.

Work: n. is the curse of the drinking classes.

Wristwatch: n. a fashion accessory with a clock in the middle, its status value being roughly proportional to the illegibility of the dial.

X

X-ray: n. a diagnostic tool used to detect existing cancerous growths and create new ones for future examinations to reveal.

Y

Yesterday: n. 1. is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.

Yesterday: n. 2. is what tomorrow will be in two days time.

Youth: n. 1. a pristine condition worshiped by menopausal women in sweatsuits and shrinking men with chestnut-brown toupees, while those who actually possess it are frequently too shallow or despondent to appreciate it.

Youth: n. 2. an ideal state, if only it came a little later in life.

Z

Zeal: n. 1. a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goes before a sprawl.

Zeal: n. 2. is a volcano, the peak of which the grass of indecisiveness does not grow.

Zoo: n. a pleasant and instructive wildlife park, lately denounced for depriving animals of their right to starve or be eaten alive in their natural habitats.

Back

• Back to MyUni
• Back to Derek Abbott's homepage
• Back to EEE Department page
• Back to the University of Adelaide homepage