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 your own or you can send me existing ones with relevant citations.

This is intended to be humour, there are no sides, and nothing is sacred here. Contradictory definitions are encouraged. The only rule is: 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.

Accordion: n. a bagpipe with pleats.

Accountant: n. 1. a dutiful book-balancer whose role within a corporation is to protect if from creative ideas.

Accountant: n. 2. a person who will prove that two and two did make four, but, after deduction of professional fees, now only comes to three.

Accusation: n. a disguised confession, where the accuser projects his own misdemeanor upon a hapless bystander.

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

Addict: n. a hobbyist with commitment.

Administration: n. a virus that spreads throughout any organization that rapidly replicates to create more administration. Can be fatal.

Admiration: n. our feeling of delight that another person resembles us.

Adore: v.t. to venerate expectantly.

Adult: n. 1. a person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle.

Adult: n. 2. a socially obedient child.

Adult: n. 3. an obsolete child.

Adultery: n. 1. is the application of democracy to love.

Adultery: n. 2. the noble act of sharing taken to its logical limits.

Adultery: n. 3. an alarmingly popular sin that, despite its name, appeals primarily to those in search of a second adolescence.

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

Afternoon: n. that part of the day we spend worrying about how we wasted the morning.

Age: n. the gift of acquiring eyesight too poor to notice any wrinkles.

Agent's fee: n. the tribute that art pays to commerce.

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

Airport: n. a destination to which we proceed with haste so that we can glance at our watches for the next two and a half hours.

Air stewardess: n. a mile high waitress.

Alcoholic: n. someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

Alimony: n. 1. is like buying hay for a dead horse.

Alimony: n. 2. the sum of money a man is commanded to pay his ex-wife in exchange for the pleasure of having her live under a separate roof.

Alpha male: n. a somewhat inferior specimen of the male species who excessively overcompensates for his lack of testosterone.

Ambassador: n. a wealthy person exiled to an alien land for the purpose of throwing parties, presumably with the hope of extracting government secrets from tipsy natives.

Ambition: n. 1. is the last refuge of the failure.

Ambition: n. 2. a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

Americans: n. pl. are escaped convicts. His Majesty is fortunate to be rid of such rabble.

Amnesia: n. a condition that enables a woman who has gone through labour to have sex again.

Amnesty: n. the state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Anarchist: n. one who is disappointed with the future before it even happens.

Anger: n. is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.

Anorexic: n. exhibiting the alluring slimness of a skeleton, like the prose style of a minimalist writer.

Antique: n. an item your grandparents bought, your parents got rid of, and you’re buying again.

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

Appeal: n. (legal term) to put the dice in the box for another throw.

A priori: adj. the term applied to reasoning from pre-existing knowledge, or even cherished prejudices.

Assumption: n. an error of which you are as yet unaware.

Aphorism: n. predigested wisdom.

Archbishop: n. a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Argument: n. an exchange of words between people with diametrically opposed views, all of whom know that they are right.

Aristocracy: n. another name for well organized bad manners.

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.

Artificial insemination: n. procreation without recreation.

Artist: n. 1. is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Artist: n. 2. being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

Artist: n. 3. a questing soul who pursues a singular vision, creates something of permanent value, and dies with the rent unpaid.

Assassination: n. is the extreme form of censorship.

Assonance: n. a rhyme that has gone wrong.

Astrologer: n. an otherwise jobless new age savant who has convinced his clientele that his ability to foretell the distant future is measurably more reliable that his recall of past events from last night's 6 o'clock news.

Astrology: n. an ancient pseudoscience and barroom conversation starter founded on the premise that everyone born under the same stars will meet a dark stranger, receive a propitious business offer or suffer an attack of dyspepsia on the same day.

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.

Atheist: n. 8. God's loyal opposition.

Australia: n. a country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

Author: n. a writer with connections in the publishing industry.

Autobiography: n. a book written about oneself, now often written by somebody else.

B

Bachelor: n. one who knows more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

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.

Bagpipes: n. an instrument of torture used by the Scots against other nations.

Bail: n. an opportunity to see if you can get away with it the second time.

Bank: n. 1. a place where money automatically increases in value, especially when we need to borrow some.

Bank: n. 2. an institution that lends money that doesn't actually exist.

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

Banking: n. a form of legalized theft where vast profits are made on transactions on monetary instruments that are not underpinned by true products and services, leading to rather spectacular global market crashes from time to time.

Bargain: n. something you can't use offered at a price you can't resist.

Baritone: n. (operatic term) unlike a tenor, a baritone is one who always sings about himself.

Bartender: n. a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

Bathroom: n. a room used by the entire family, believed by all except mothers to be self-cleaning.

Belladonna: n. in Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

Belt: n. worn around the waist to give other people the impression that one is slim enough to require it.

Big bang: n. the primordial slap on the backside of the newborn universe.

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

Bimbo: n. one whose IQ is smaller than their bra size.

Biography: n. a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

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

Black holes: n. are where God divided by zero.

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

Bonus: n. money your boss gets each year for controlling your department's costs. Of course, if he paid your bonus he wouldn't achieve that target.

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.

Bore: n. 4. one who leaves nothing out.

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.

Bravery: n. a dizzying combination of luck and stupidity; the act of one who miscalculates the risks and yet survives by pure chance.

Brevity: n. is the soul of lingerie.

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

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

Building regulations: n. local civic laws regulating the construction of buildings, devised to make planning a bungalow in the Twentieth Century slower than building a cathedral in the Twelfth Century.

Bureaucracy: n. 1. an ingenious scheme by benevolent governments for graciously providing unlimited mass employment.

Bureaucracy: n. 2. a group of over educated and underwhelming individuals who combine mystification and ineffectiveness in order to facilitate entropy.

Bureaucracy: n. 3. a government-funded distortion of national unemployment figures.

Bureaucracy: n. 4. a stubborn clog in the sewer pipe of government.

Business: n. organized cheating.

C

Car: n. a motorized cubicle on wheels in which using a phone whilst driving is illegal. However, shaving, knitting, origami folding, eating, undressing, and performing lewd acts whilst driving are perfectly acceptable and fundamental to human liberty.

Compiler: n. (computing term) a program written specifically to treat a higher level language program as data, reduce some of it to machine code, rearrange the rest into another higher level language such as Greek, display an alarming and incomprehensible message such as 'Fatal Internal Stack Failure' and then give up.

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.

Capitalism: n. survival of the fattest.

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.

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.

CD player: n. an irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.

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

Celibacy: n. 1. 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.

Celibacy: n. 2. a renouncement of pleasures of the flesh followed by indefinite abstinence, usually lasting no more than three days with best of intentions.

Celibacy: n. 3. mind over hormones.

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.

Chicken: n. an animal you eat before its born and after its dead.

Chihuahua: n. a Mexican rat which is sometimes mistaken for a dog.

Childhood: n. the rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

Cinnamon: n. sawdust.

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

Classic: n. a book that everyone praises, but no one reads.

Clergyman: n. the official custodian of a religious congregation's ancient tribal beliefs, appointed so that members can leave spiritual matters to a qualified professional while they go about the business of sinning and making a living.

Clothing: n. a means to allow nakedness at one's choosing.

Cocktail party: n. a device for paying off obligations to people you don't want to invite to dinner.

Coincidence: n. a powerful aphrodisiac.

College: n. the four year period when parents are permitted access to the telephone.

Colloquialism: n. a formal word for an informal word.

Comedian: n. one whose duty it is to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

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

Commitment: n. the capacity of a would-be husband to do what he's told.

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.

Committee: n. 3. a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Communism: n. 1. is largely made up of prophecies, like any other revealed religion.

Communism: n. 2. liberation of the people from the burdens of liberty.

Communist: n. in the UK, a child of the 1950s with hippy tendencies who fought for unionism, despised bourgeois values, and lived in the poorest regions of London's East End. These formerly squalid living quarters are now trendy upwardly mobile lodgings, reaping the benefits of successive property price booms, transforming their eager owners into well-coiffed landlords with all the values they once previously spurned.

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

Comprehensive school: n. in the UK, a large-scale plant for the systematic production of consistent mediocrity.

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

Computer: n. 1. an electronic time-saving device that is commonly used for time-wasting activities.

Computer: n. 2. a modern device for spewing out great quantities of scrap paper and incorrect information.

Computer virus: n. a welcomed device for keeping anti-virus software manufacturers in business.

Concept: n. any idea for which an outside consultant billed you more than $25,000.

Conception: n. the miracle of producing losers from winners.

Conclusion: n. the place where you got tired of thinking.

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.

Confession: n. a declaration of one's faults. Often done by confessing little faults, to suggest the absence of big ones.

Confidence: n. the feeling one experiences before one fully understands the situation.

Confidential: n. won't be leaked to the newspapers until later today.

Conflict of interest: n. 1. an ingenious mechanism for reluctantly forfeiting time consuming professional duties, avoiding committee meetings, and dodging jury service.

Conflict of interest: n. 2. in the US, the reason cited why government officials are not allowed to let you pay their lunch bill, thereby implying they are so cheap that they can be bribed with only one business lunch.

Conflict of interest: n. 3. in the US, the reason for impeaching a President if he has inappropriate relations with a junior staff member, but is perfectly acceptable when generously handing out post-war reconstruction contracts out to all your buddies.

Conflict of interest: n. 4. an ethical principle that precludes one inappropriately taking part in an activity, but unfortunately does not count as a reason to exclude you from wartime army service.

Conflict of interest: n. 5. what is automatically suspected if you don't declare it, but is unquestioned if you declare it and eagerly leave a committee meeting.

Conflict of interest: n. 6. is the situation that occurs when a government punishes the people for its dependence on discredited substances (eg. tobacco, carbon etc.) by raising taxes on them, thereby increasing the government's own dependence.

Congratulation: n. the civility of envy.

Conscience: n. 1. the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Conscience: n. 2. is that which hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

Conscience: n. 3. is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.

Conscience: n. 4. is that which makes cowards of us all.

Conscience: n. 5. an anticipation of other people's opinions.

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.

Conservative: n. 3. in the US, one who believes that non-conservatives in other countries are either 'commies' or socialists and that conservatives in other countries are either despots or terrorists.

Conservative: n. 4. one tending to maintain existing views and conditions; often extending to faithfully conserving his maturity from when he was 9 years old.

Conservative: n. 5. in the US, one with a faith so large that he can move mountains, dispel global warming, and cause abiotic oil to eternally spout forth from the earth.

Conservative: n. 6. in the US, a decent fellow who counsels the poor to earn pennies for their daily bread, while he and his family dine nightly on filet mignon.

Conservative: n. 7. one who adopts old worn out views once invented by radicals.

Consistent: n. dead.

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

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

Conspiracy theory: n. that which joins up all the factual dots in the simplest way, at the expense of assuming a rather complicated set of underlying motives put into action by flawless forward planning.

Consult: n. to seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.

Consultant: n. 1. a jobless person who shows executives how to work.

Consultant: n. 2. one who has credibility because he's not dumb enough to work at your company.

Consultant: n. 3. a person who is called in when no one wants to take the blame for what is going on.

Contraception: n. an opportunity for one party to 'accidentally' produce a pregnancy without mutual consent.

Contract: n. a document that makes extortion legal.

Cordon bleu: n. a term used to describe an individual who is particularly adept at disguising food.

Correctional facility: n. rent-free public housing for thieves, rapists, muggers, murderers, deadbeats, extortionists, drug fiends, and other assorted malcontents who are thought to benefit from confinement in each other's company.

Corruption: n. is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.

Corporation: n. 1. an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Corporation: n. 2. a miniature totalitarian state governed by a hierarchy of unelected officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality, and eggheads.

Cosmetics: n. 1. a means of presenting goods without necessarily guaranteeing their delivery.

Cosmetics: n. 2. an arsenal of facial enhancements commonly applied in excess by women and male celebrities who feel the need to look embalmed.

Cosmetics: n. 3. used for enhancing a woman's beauty—a sign of things not necessarily to come.

Country: n. a piece of land with an imaginary border, across which the flow of travellers is forceably controlled. A device that bestows a basic freedom to migrating birds, but denies the same to humans.

Courage: n. is often lack of insight, whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.

Courtesy: n. 1. the art of yawning with your mouth closed.

Courtesy: n. 2. a form of polite behaviour practiced by civilized people when they have time.

Cover up: n. responsible discretion exercised in the national interest to prevent unnecessary disclosure of eminently justifiable procedures in which an untimely revelation would severely impair public confidence.

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.

Credit: n. (in finance) a gift that keeps on taking.

Criminal: n. a person with predatory instincts who hasn't sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Criminal lawyer: n. a tautology.

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.

Crouton: n. stale bread.

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.

Cuddling: n. a sweetly chaste form of intimacy that tends to make the average man feel like a muzzled hound on a fox hunt.

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.

Cynic: n. 6. a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Cynic: n. 7. one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

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

D

Dancing: n. a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Danger: n. a perilous situation that arises if you are right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Date: n. a opportunity to find out why another person is still single.

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.

Death: n. that which is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.

Debugging: n. the process of removing software bugs, as opposed to programming that is the process of putting them in.

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

Democratic election: n. a pork barrel load of promises.

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 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.

Democracy: n. 7. a democracy is the name politicians give to their electorate when they need them.

Democracy: n. 8. a system which ensures that everybody gets what nobody wants.

Democracy: n. 9. a dictatorship by the corporations with the money to influence mindless votes.

Democracy: n. 10. is that which guarantees an equality of opportunity, but not an equality of conditions.

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

Depression: n. 1. that which causes women to either eat or go shopping, or men to invade another country.

Depression: n. 2. one-sided bipolar disorder.

Desk: n. a semi-mythical structure believed to exist underneath all your paperwork.

Dictator: n. the alpha male in a tribe of baboons.

Diplomacy: n. the patriotic art of lying for one's country.

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

Disciplinarian: n. one who selflessly improves the performance of others by dangling the threat of punishment over them for their rightful edification.

Discontentment: n. an absurdly exaggerated idea of the happiness of others.

Discretion: n. secrecy.

Disk crash: n. a typical computer response to any critical deadline.

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.

Dressed: n. the state of being naked under one's clothing.

Doctor: n. the same as a lawyer; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

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

Dog owners: n. pl. cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.

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.

Doubt: n. 4. beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

Downsizing: v. the act of ejecting a large number of employees from a company, as opposed to 'firing' that is a term reserved for the privileged few.

Drugs: n. pl. in the 1960s, were substances like LSD that made the world look weird, now it's ones like Prozac to make the world look normal.

Dumped n. the state in which your latest love interest has selflessly relieved you of any obligation to put up with a lifetime of their toxic behaviour. There are three types of dump: (i) The honest dump is when you are told you are incompatible on the first date. This in fact saves you of a lifetime of misery and is the most sought-after variety. (ii) The dishonest dump is when you are strung along dating for many years, nagged to spend a fortune on diamonds, and then dumped. (iii) The psycho dump is when you are dumped in hell-fire anger on the second date after a minor infraction, such as inconsiderately forgetting to phone that same night to soothe her insecurities. The psycho dumper is one who's honesty of emotion finally wins over their dishonesty of mind, at least releasing you from a life of eternal torment.

Dust: n. mud with all the juice sucked out.

Dyslexia: n. a medical condition whose sufferers couldn't possibly spell it.

E

Eclair: n. a cake, long in shape but short in duration.

Economic growth: n. paying out twice as much in taxes as one formerly got in wages.

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

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

Economy: n. a complex system of bankruptcies, loans, and overdrafts.

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. 1. person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Egoist: n. 2. one who rises above the slimy obsequiousness that humility brings.

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

Elder: n. one who asserts his authority over you by virtue of his immutable age difference, but to whose chagrin finds that you rapidly sneak up to him in terms of age ratio.

Election: n. 1. a democratic ritual carried out in order to check if the polls were right.

Election: n. 2. that in which each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Election: n. 3. a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Electricity: n. is really just organized lightning.

Electrocution: n. burning at the stake with all the modern improvements.

Emissions trading: n. 1. a brilliant mechanism allowing corporations to pollute the environment guilt-free, whilst driving up the prices for further corporate gain.

Emissions trading: n. 2. a pollution control scheme that is rather like allowing a criminal to buy his way out of jail based on finding one honest person in the world to apparently reduce the overall crime footprint.

Encryption: n. (computing term) a powerful algorithmic encoding technique designed to deny useful content to casual readers. Often used in the creation of computer manuals.

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

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

Enemy: n. 3. a friend who you got to know better.

English: n. the English are those with the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

Englishman: n. one who instinctively admires any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

Enthusiasm: n. naive keenness curable by small doses of experience.

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

Equity: n. a term liberally applied in office politics to enforce policies that disadvantage you when you are out of favour. When you are in favour those same policies are circumvented using incantations such as 'performance bonus,' 'salary loading,' and 'recognition according to merit.'

Erratic: n. consistently inconsistent.

Epic: n. (literary term) too long.

Etc: abbr. an abbreviation inserted into a written text to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.

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.

Ethics: n. 3. the best reasons in the world why people should think like you do.

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.

Erogenous zone: n. by current reckoning, any region of the human topography with the possible exception of the elbows.

Estimate: n. an amount approximately equal to half the eventual cost.

Euphemism: n. a figure of speech in which the speaker or writer makes his expression a good deal softer than the facts would warrant him in doing.

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

Exaggeration: n. 1. is truth that has lost its temper.

Exaggeration: n. 2. a legitimate literary device to draw attention to the truth.

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

Experience: n. 1. is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Experience: n. 2. is the ability to repeat one's mistakes with ever-increasing confidence.

Experience: n. 3. is something you don't get until just after you need it.

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.

Expert: n. 4. a person who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

Expert: n. 5. the last audible voice saying it can't be done, if the world were to blow itself up.

Explanation: n. condensed descriptions.

F

Facebook: n. a social networking website that brings people spread over a large metropolis all the advantages of a close knit community, including lack of privacy.

Fact: n. 1. a folly committed by enough of the right people to confer on it the badge of status.

Fact: n. 2. information gathered with great accuracy, only to be distorted later.

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.

Faith: n. 4. is not wanting to know what is true.

Fascism: n. nationalism with obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Fashion: n. 1. a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Fashion: n. 2. a means of expressing one's individuality by wearing and doing exactly the same things as others.

Fashion: n. 3. that which is unwearable until everyone else is wearing it, by which time it is unfashionable.

Fashion: n. 4. a clothing epidemic.

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.

Felon: n. a person of greater enterprise than discretion, which in embracing and opportunity has formed an unfortunate attachment.

Female: n. in biology, the thing that is more likely to bite you.

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.

Fidelity: n. failure to share.

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

Fine: n. a tax for doing wrong as opposed to a tax, which is a fine for doing well.

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.

Flashlight: n. a case for storing dead batteries and light bulbs.

Flattery: n. a gift-wrapped insult.

Flexibility: n. capacity to contradict your principles.

Flying: adj. 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.

Fool: n. 1. a condition a man may not be aware of, until he is constantly reminded of it after marriage.

Fool: n. 2. one who announces loudly that he doesn't suffer others like him gladly.

Foolproof: n. ideal that cannot be obtained in the presence sufficiently talented fool.

Forgiveness: n. that which is inspired by revenge.

Foundation grant: n. a bourgeois beneficence that enables unmarketable artists to continue expressing their contempt for bourgeois values.

Franchise: n. a form of business that aims at internationally spawning clones of itself for world domination, providing goods and services that are meticulously consistent in quality. Consistently bad.

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. is a man's natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

Freedom: n. 3. what the U.S. frequently exports to developing nations, by force if necessary.

French: n. a race of people who take perverse pleasure in designing car engines completely differently from the British.

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.

Friendless: n. addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

Fun: n. a form of enjoyment that advertising agencies would have you believe everyone, except yourself, is having.

Fundamentalist: n. 1. 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.

Fundamentalist: n. 2. in the US, one who is vehemently opposed to the suggestion of any hereditary descendence from an ape and yet behaves like one in matters of foreign policy.

Fundamentalist: n. 3. one whose fear of uncertainty extends to his fear of diversity.

G

Gambler: n. one who picks his own pocket.

Gambling: n. a tax on the mathematically impaired.

Geek: n. 1. a person whose experience of lingerie is limited to shop windows and catalogues. Geeks divide their own clothes into two piles—filthy, and filthy but wearable.

Geek: n. 2. a dateless bespectacled engineering student who is constantly spurned by girls, but then later in life has to reluctantly turn down scores of marriage proposals from top fashion models after selling his latest dotcom enterprise for a few billion.

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

Genius: n. one who is clever enough to ensure no one is watching when he luckily stumbles on a good idea.

Gentleman: n. 1. formerly the male exemplar of honour, nobility and other behavioural relics from the Age of Chivalry; now dismissed as someone with a testosterone deficiency.

Gentleman: n. 2. a gentlemen is simply a patient wolf.

Ghost: n. the outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

Gifted children: n. pl. unfortunate tykes who lack the good sense to hide their talents from overly ambitious parents.

Gigolo: n. a man whose reputation has been eagerly created by numerous individual women, and yet meets with their collective disapproval.

Girlfriend: n. a man's future ex-wife.

Global warming: n. a meteorological phenomenon cited to explain the appearance of three consecutive days of fine weather in a British summer.

God: n. 1. one who created us in His image, and we have more than reciprocated.

God: n. 2. one who answers all prayers, and sometimes with a no.

Good breeding: n. consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

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

Gossip: n. a person who will never tell a lie if the truth will do more damage.

Government: n. the thing that always gets in nomatter who you vote for.

Grandparents: n. the people who think your children are wonderful even though they're sure you're not raising them right.

Guerrilla: n. what the enemy calls your freedom fighter.

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

H

Hardware: n. the equipment used to reveal software faults.

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.

Haute cuisine: n. the fine art of serving cold soup on purpose.

Headache: n. that which is instantly cured by sex and yet prohibits any treatment.

Health: n. 1. a delicate equilibrium that may be upset by smoking too many cigarettes or reading too many alarming medical studies.

Health: n. 2. is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

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.

Heir: n. the idle offspring of a workaholic.

Hell: n. 1. a perpetual holiday.

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

Hell: n. 3. eternal torment reserved for the afterlife or available now on an installment plan, known as marriage.

Hermit: n. one with no peer pressure.

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.

Historian: n. 1. an unsuccessful novelist.

Historian: n. 2. one whose future lies in the past.

History: n. 1. a fable agreed upon.

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

History: n. 3. is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

History: n. 4. prophecy backwards.

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.

Horoscope: n. a prediction that is always true due to sufficient generality.

Hors d’oeuvres n. a sandwich cut into 20 pieces.

Hotel: n. a refuge from home life.

House of Lords: n. in the UK, a body of elderly persons charged with high duties and misdemeanours.

Human: n. 1. 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. 2. 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.

Human: n. 3. one who is smart enough to have ideas but foolish enough to believe them.

Human: n. 4. one who does irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.

Human: n. 5. an ingenious assemblage of portable plumbing.

Humans: n. pl. creatures that all look the same and taste like chicken. They even behave like chickens if you put them together in a cage.

Human resources: n. corporate nomenclature intended to confer greater dignity on personnel managers while reducing everyone else in the company to the status of bauxite or wood-pulp.

Humility: n. a quality that disappears the moment you think you have it.

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

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

Hunger: n. the best sauce.

Hunk: n. a man freely viewed as a sex object by women who refuse to be viewed as such themselves, and generally aren't anyway.

Husband: n. a person who empties the waste paper bin and believes that he has cleaned the whole house.

Hyperactive children: n. a cheap and relatively clean energy source that might be put to good use after we deplete the planet's supply of fossil fuels.

Hypocrisy: n. is the vaseline of social intercourse.

Hypocrite: n. one who nobly disapproves of the despised virtues that he is afflicted with.

Hypocondria: n. the only illness a hypochondriac thinks he or she doesn't have.

I

Idea: n. an idea is that which puts the truth in check mate.

Idealism: n. is when men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

Ignorance: n. that which is not as vast as our failure to use what we know.

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.

Immorality: n. the morality of those who are having a better time.

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

Income tax: n. is the hardest thing in the world to understand.

Incredulity: n. the difficulty in accepting that a man is telling the truth, when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Inflation: n. cutting money in half without damaging the paper.

Information: n. a somewhat random sequence of symbols that has value to its beholder.

Innovation: n. the rediscovery of a forgotten old trick, within a modern context.

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.

Insanity: n. 3. the only thing that keeps you sane in a crazy world.

Insurance: n. a form of gambling in which we bet against our chance of escaping disaster, and win only when we lose.

Intelligence: n. is the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education is the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.

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.

IQ: n. the number that predicts the extent to which one will perform successfully on subsequent IQ tests.

J

Jazz: n. music that goes nowhere and finds no resolution—remove any 10 minute sequence and no one will notice the difference.

Jet set: n. gypsies with money.

Job: n. the ideal gift for a high school or college graduate.

Joke: n. a form of short story where all the information comes at the end.

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

Junk food: n. cheap, satisfying, flavoursome victuals used as a substitute for real food and consisting mainly of salt, fat and sugar, deep-fried to bring out their full atherosclerotic potential.

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.

Justice: n. a decision in your favour.

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.

Killer: n. one who generously risks his life to put the pain of others to an end.

Kiss: v. to get two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other.

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.

Language: n. 3. a virus from outer space.

Laptop computer: n. a device invented to force businessmen to work at home, on vacation, and on business trips.

Last orders: n. a daily 15 minute period generally used as a rehearsal for the end of the world.

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.

Lawyer: n. 3. one skilled in circumvention of the law.

Lawyer: n. 4. an advocate of the highest bidder, in contradistinction to an advocate of ethics.

Lawyer: n. 5. a learned gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it himself.

Lecher: n. a stud with liver spots.

Leftist: n. a liberal who bites.

Legal: n. is what formerly meant lawful; now it means loophole

Legend: n. a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Lesbian: n. a quaint euphemism for a woman who resists the intrusion of a man into her private affairs but concurs with his taste in sex partners.

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

Liar: n. a lawyer on a high commission.

Liberal: n. one who tolerates all beliefs and opinions except those with which he disagrees.

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

Lie: n. 1. an epistemological problem.

Lie: n. 2. economy of truth.

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: n. 4. a sequence of events one is not prepared for.

Life: n. 5. is a series of collisions with the future.

Life: n. 6. is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

Life: n. 7. the interval between birth and death.

Life: n. 8. one long postponement.

Life: n. 9. a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave.

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'.

Litigation: n. 1. a machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage..

Litigation: n. 2. that which filters out bad management, just like evolution filters out bad genes.

Logic: n. 1. the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Logic: n. 2. is the art of going wrong with confidence.

Loser: n. 1. a highly successfully person who impeccably lives up to measures not sanctioned by the majority.

Loser: n. 2. anyone too incompetent to master the ways of the world, or too proud.

Lost: n. in the US, an interminable TV series proving an exception to the rule that one should never read a spoiler.

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.

Love: 4. n. is staying up all night with a sick child, or a healthy adult.

Love: 5. n. an endorphin-induced hallucinatory state designed by mother Nature to trick us into procreation.

Love: 6. n. is that which conquers all things except poverty and toothache.

Love: 7. n. a state of perceptual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Love: 8. n. the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.

Love: 9. n. is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

Loyalty scheme: n. a corporate device for limiting customer choice.

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

M

Machines: n. pl. labour saving devices efficient enough to put humans out of employment, but with the ingenious advantage that they create a sufficient number of problems to employ twice as many to solve them.

Mad: adj. affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

Maintenance-free: adj. irreparable.

Majority: n. a large group of people who have gotten tired of thinking and have decided to accept somebody else’s opinion.

Management: n. 1. 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: n. 2. administration.

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

Manifesto: n. 1. a statement of what you would get up to if you had talent, honour and principles.

Manifesto: n. 2. organized gibberish masquerading as a panacea for all society's ills.

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.

Marriage: n. 7. the demonstration that warfare between the sexes does not work, thus serving as a salient reminder that warfare between the races is equally doomed.

Marriage: n. 8. a bond formed by mutual lack of common sense.

Marriage: n. 9. is that which takes the vastness of all the possibilities lying on the horizon of life, swiftly slaughtering them all to leave just one.

Marriage: n. 10. the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

Marriage: n. 11. is where the chain of wedlock is so heavy that it needs two to carry it, and sometimes three.

Marriage: n. 12. is a condition where it is impossible to be a fool and not know it.

Marriage: n. 13. is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.

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.

Mastication: n. gastronomic music performed on the xylophone of the mandibles.

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.

Mathematician: n. 1. a device for turning coffee into theorems.

Mathematician: n. 2. one well-versed in calculus of the variations, Riemann manifolds, and higher algebras, but who cannot count, do simple arithmetic or balance his accounts.

Mathematics: n. 1. a product of the human imagination that sometimes works on simplified models of reality.

Mathematics: n. 2. is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

Mathematics: n. 3. is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

Maturity: n. 1. the status obtained after a sufficient number of years of immaturity have elapsed.

Maturity: n. 2. is a state we reach the day we don't need to be lied to about anything.

Medicine: n. consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Memory: n. is the thing you forget with.

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

Method actor: n. one who can't act, so instead becomes the character.

Military action: n. an ultimate gift to a regime that gives what its hardliners were actively seeking 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.

Mime: n. a dramatic device that does little violence to the language.

Minimalism: n. a rather long word for describing the opposite.

Mining: n. the rape of virgin soil, to avoid the monotony of recycling.

Miracle: n. 1. a natural law that happens once.

Miracle: n. 2. (scientific term) when plotting experimental data on a graph, any inexplicable point that is more than a standard deviation from the best fit curve, which cannot be repeated no matter how hard you try, must be a miracle.

Misdemeanor: n. an infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

Miser: n. a person who lives poor so that he can die rich.

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.

Mistake: n. making a mistake is an excellent means for getting everyone's undivided attention.

Moderate: n. (politics) one who cannot find equilibrium at either end of the political spectrum.

Moderation: n. a form of extremism that places a tight grip upon the human impulse.

Money: n. a medium of exchange whose chief value lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

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

Moral indignation: n. is jealousy with a halo.

Morality: n. is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Morals: n. excuses for not behaving badly.

Mother: n. someone who thinks that girls who go after her son are brazen and the ones who don’t are stupid.

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.

Murder: v. the act of killing, unless it is done in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Musicologist: n. a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Music video: n. how film-school cinematographers and posturing post-pubescent stars collaborated to keep rock music on artificial life support long after it should have died naturally.

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

N

Nail polish: n. part of an assortment of make-up items such as lipstick, eyeliner, blush etc. which ironically makes a woman look better whilst making her young daughter look like a 'tramp'.

Narcissist: n. one with inflated self-love, having the big advantage that he won't encounter many rivals for his love.

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."

Natural disaster: n. like wars and other national emergencies, natural disasters are a Godsend to any government for diverting attention from its failed domestic policies. Also an opportunistic device for implementing new policies that would otherwise never see the light of day.

Necessity: n. almost any luxury you see in the house of a neighbour.

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

Nepotism: n. a sincere belief that charity begins at home.

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

Nerds: n. pl. a race of socially inept, fashion-challenged technophiles that are venerated as it is they that inheriteth the Earth.

Neurotic: n. someone who worries about things that didn't happen in the past instead of worrying about something that won't happen in the future, like normal people.

Neurotics: n. pl. neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases.

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

No: n. it is recommended that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we would be in a position to think through all the implications and take a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action that might well have unforeseen circumstances.

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.

Nostalgia: n. fond thoughts of imaginary times gone past.

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.

Nuclear weapon: n. 1. a means of bringing about ultimate peace—the cherished peace of silence that total annihilation thankfully brings.

Nuclear weapon: n. 2. an agency reserved for use by the most civilized nations for the settlement of disputes that might become troublesome if left unadjusted. Unfortunately, too many formerly uncivilized nations are becoming civilized.

O

Oats: n. a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Observatory: n. a place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.

Obsession: n. commitment with fervour.

Obsessive compulsive: n. highly focussed.

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

Office: n. 1. a place where you relax after your strenuous home life.

Office: n. 2. a clean, functional, brightly lit cell inhabited five days a week by diligent souls who forfeit their lives to make a living.

Office politics: n. a system of secret alliances, treacherous intrigues, backstabbings and petty rivalries designed to relieve the tedium of corporate life. The chief legacy of Byzantine civilization in the Western world, appropriately modified for our times; instead of blinding or maiming one's rivals, one simply mutilates their egos.

Oil: n. the flammable liquid residue of fossilized prehistoric plants and beasts, found to be suitable for fueling engines and Middle East conflicts.

Old age: n. 1. is when regrets take the place of dreams.

Old age: n. 2. is fifteen years older than I am.

Old age: n. 3. is when competence is a turn on.

Online: n. offlife.

Opinion: n. what seems to one to be probably true.

Ontology: n. the theory that there are multiple universes with only one having the property of existence.

Opportunist: n. a person who starts taking bath if he accidentally falls into a river.

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

Opposition: n. in politics, the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

Optimism: n. 1. is inevitably the last hope of the defeated.

Optimism: n. 2. is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

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.

Orchestra: n. an overgrown chamber ensemble.

Order: n. is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

Organ donor: n. someone who looks forward to being outlived by his liver.

Originality: n. judicious imitation.

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

P

Pacifist: n. one who does not kill his enemies, but reads their obituaries with great pleasure.

Pain: n. an uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.

Panic room: n. a secure room within a building , designed as a refuge from threats such as severe weather, nuclear attack or disgruntled employees.

Passport: n. a document treacherously inflicted upon a citizen going abroad, exposing him as an alien and pointing him out for special reprobation and outrage.

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.

Parallel: adj. (computing term) being or pertaining to everything going wrong at once.

Paranoia: n. 1. the pathological belief that one is important enough to be the object of a conspiracy.

Paranoia: n. 2. the unreasonable belief that others actually have the time, vast sums of money, and telepathic powers to so perfectly tweak all one's pet annoyances.

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

Patriot: n. 1. is one who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

Patriot: n. 2. one who is ready to defend his country against his government.

Patriot: n. 3. one to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

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.

Peace: n. 1. in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Peace: n. 2. is that which cannot be learned by killing each other's children.

Perfection: n. that which is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Perfume: n. a pungent liquid manufactured by the megalitre for the female population, serving to reinforce the suspicion that the dividing line between the fragrance of heavenly nectar and lavatory freshener is a narrow one.

Perplexity: n. is the beginning of knowledge.

Personal floatation device: n. an air filled jacket that saves your life should an aircraft land in water. Demonstrated with great zeal by the crew at the beginning of every flight, even if the flight path is over land only.

Personality disorder: n. 1. eccentricity with true commitment.

Personality disorder: n. 2. a guarantee against boredom.

Pessimist: n. 1. someone who’s never happy unless he’s miserable.

Pessimist: n. 2. someone who wears suspenders as well as a belt.

Pessimist: n. 3. one who would complain about the noise if opportunity knocked.

Pessimist: n. 4. a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

Pessimist: n. 5. someone who had to live with an optimist.

Philanthropist: n. 1. one who selflessly funds vast sums of money to a charitable cause, without drawing attention to himself, but who fails sufficiently to then be recognized as a philanthropist and who then graciously accepts all the tax breaks with absolutely no fanfare at all.

Philanthropist: n. 2. one who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

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

Philosophy: n. 1. a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Philosophy: n. 2. is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.

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

Physicians: n. are those that think they do a lot fir a patient when they give his disease a name.

Piracy: n. the seaborne plundering of gold, the kidnapping of wenches or the downloading of movies.

Plagiarism: n. 1. a literary coincidence where an honorable work is faced with a discreditable priority.

Plagiarism: n. 2. failure to adorn stolen ideas with footnotes, as opposed to scholarship, which repeatedly acknowledges the theft.

Plan: v.t. to bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.

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

Platitude: n. an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Platonic love: n. a loaded pistol waiting to go off.

Platonism: n. a viral form of philosophical reductionism that breaks apart wholistic concepts into imaginary dualisms, thereby generating the insidious inequalities that all mankind's miseries are based upon.

Play: n. is work that you enjoy doing for nothing.

Pleasure: n. that which is merely relief.

Poetry: n. is that which communicates before it is understood.

Policy: n. a magic veil that endows corporate bosses and politicians the appearance of acting with consistency, but that can conveniently change its colour like a chameleon when strategic double-talk is required.

Politeness: n. the most acceptable hypocrisy.

Political campaign: n. is the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

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.

Political correctness: n. 3. the use of inadvertently comical euphemisms mandated by committees of humorless academicians for the purposes of offending no group except believers in free speech.

Political speech: n. what you say when you're not saying anything. See polite conversation.

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.

Politician: n. 4. an ingenious criminal who covers his secret thieving with a pretence of open marauding.

Politician: n. 5. an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

Politician: n. 6. one who delivers on economy of the truth, rather than truth on the economy.

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.

Politics: n. 4. is the entertainment branch of industry.

Politics: n. 5. the art of ignoring obvious facts.

Pollution: n. the chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.

Polygamy: n. 1. an act of supreme sacrifice where a man risks his life to more than one mother-in-law.

Polygamy: n. 2. a house of atonement , or expiatory chapel, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one.

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

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

Pornography: n. 3. is a satire on human pretensions.

Pornography: n. 4. a two-dimensional substitute for that which the consumer cannot accomplish in three.

Pornography: n. 5. that which excites, whether from approval or disapproval.

Positive: n. mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Positive thinking: n. self-improvement through self-deception.

Poodle: n. a dog breed often paraded as a living emblem of its owner's willful lack of taste.

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

Prejudice: n. 1. a great way of saving time by quickly forming an opinion without bothering to get the facts.

Prejudice: n. 2. you are free from prejudice when you hate everyone equally.

Presidency: n. a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches as the first prize.

President: n. one who assumes the position of running a country, who if he had any talent at running anything would be earning a lot more running a multinational business empire.

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

Present: n. 1. an illusory state between immediate past and immediate future.

Present: n. 2. that which is pregnant with the future.

Press: n. in the US, a freewheeling clan of news scribes who unofficially elect a President every four years, then conspire to drive him from office.

Preventive maintenance: n. a superstitious ritual in which an engineer is allowed to break things and display his inability to fix them in the forlorn hope that this will appease some unknown gods.

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

Prison: n. a governmental cost cutting measure, carried out by ostensibly rehabilitating serial killers and petty offenders all under the same roof.

Problem: n. that which cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created it.

Procrastination: n. 1. is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

Procrastination: n. 2. the immediate minimization of excessive hastiness.

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.

Programming: n. (computing term) the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.

Prohibitionist: n. is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

Proof: n. evidence having a shade more plausibility than of unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that of only one.

Propaganda: n. patriotism as practiced by our enemies.

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

Proposal: n. a proposition that lost its nerve.

Prostitution: n. 1. 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.

Prostitution: n. 2. the only business in the world where the amateurs are better than the professionals.

Proverb: n. for a witticism of unknown attribution, the label 'proverb' is what replaces the label 'anon' after a sufficient number of centuries have elapsed.

Prude: n. a bawd hiding behind the back of her demeanor.

Public opinion: n. what people think people think.

Public relations: n. propaganda for hire.

Punctuality: n. being on time; with the disadvantage that there is nobody there to appreciate it.

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

Q

Quagmire: n. is any situation more easily entered into than exited from.

Quantum particles: n. are the dreams that stuff is made of.

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

R

Radical: n. a man with both feet planted firmly in the air.

Random choice: n. an improvement on management decisions.

Randomness: n. a hidden order, where the key to its decypherment is lost or unknown.

Randomness: n. (mathematical term) the most ordered way to avoid redundancy.

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.

Reason: n. pretext.

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

Refuse: v. to refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

Relationship: n. is that which is easiest with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.

Relative: n. a grotesque caricature of oneself.

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.

Religion: n. 3. a spiritual straight-jacket.

Remarriage: n. the triumph of hope over experience.

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

Republican: n. 1. in the US, a creature that remains after all humanity is removed from a politician.

Republican: n. 2. in the US, the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

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.

Retainer: n. a bribe below $100,000, as opposed to an 'ex-gratia payment' that is a bribe between $100,000 and $500,000 or an 'advance against profit sharing' that is a bribe over $500,000.

Reproduction: n. the division of amoebas, the pollination of plants, the rutting of wildebeest, and the drunken frenzied Friday nights of humans.

Revelry: n. the sound of people pretending to have a good time.

Revolution: n. that which evaporates and leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Rich: n. becoming rich is the best way to finding missing relatives.

Rite: n. a religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.

Robber: n. one whose careful planning and execution of a heist is much more demanding and pays much less than dropping his ethical standards by being gainfully employed as a lawyer.

Romance: n. is that which begins with a prince kissing an angel, and ends with a bald headed man yawning at a fat woman.

S

Safety belt: n. 1. a means for denying transplant patients the body parts they so desperately require.

Safety belt: n. 2. on an aircraft, a device that extends your life by precisely two extra seconds as you plummet to the ground precariously strapped to an incinerated piece of fuselage.

Safety belt: n. 3. on an aircraft, a means for helping the rescue team to identify your body.

Saint: n. a dead sinner revised and edited.

Satanist: n. one who defeats himself by displaying all the noble qualities of loyalty, love, truth, and charity towards fellow satanic brothers.

Satire: n. an obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

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.

Science: n. 4. is that in which authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

Science fiction: n. is the improbable made possible, as opposed to fantasy that is the impossible made probable.

Secret: n. something you tell to only one person at a time.

Seethe: v. to quietly reflect that many are better than you at everything.

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

Self-esteem: n. the dangling carrot that drives the self-help industry.

Selfish: adj. 1. devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

Selfish: adj. 2. a selfish person is one so self-absorbed, providing the consolation that he isn't even aware of the bad press about you. The guarantee of a loyal friendship.

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.

Seriousness: n. is the only refuge of the shallow.

Sex: n. 1. is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

Sex: n. 2. a form of Russian roulette that can result in producing a saint or a dictator.

Sex: n. 3. the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.

Shin: n. a device for finding furniture in the dark.

Show business: n. sincere insincerity.

Silence: n. 1. is the perfect expression of scorn.

Silence: n. 2. the period before a child is born and after it goes to college.

Silence: n. 3. is the voice of complicity.

Sin: n. self-expression.

Skeleton: n. a bunch of bones with the person scraped off.

Skeptic: n. a true believer in another set of beliefs.

Slang: n. language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and gets down to work.

Sloth: n. a condition condemned by those without the imagination to create free time.

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.

Society: n. that which honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Song: n. 1. the licensed medium for bawling in public things too silly or sacred to be uttered in ordinary speech.

Song: n. 2. anything that is too stupid to be spoken.

Software bug: n. a random feature embedded in a perfectly good piece of software.

Sorcery: n. the ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence. It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by torture and death.

Specialist: n. a man who knows more and more about less and less, according to a generalist. As opposed to a generalist who knows less and less about more and more, according to the specialist.

Speed dating: n. an opportunity to get over all your disappointments at one.

Sperm: n. a champion swimmer that disappointingly loses all its ability after it turns into a human.

Sperm donor: n. an apathetic rapist who nevertheless achieves his goal of gratuitously filling the genetic pool as widely as possible with his genes.

Sports car: n. penis prosthetic.

Standard: adj. manufactured by the biggest supplier.

Stalker: n. an admirer whose attentions are unwanted.

Stalling: n. creative inertia.

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

Statesman: n. a politician who has been dead ten or fifteen years.

Statistician: n. 1. a man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Statistician: n. 2. is someone who is good with numbers, but lacks the personality to be an accountant.

Statistics: n. is the science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

Stockbroker: n. one who invests your money until it has all gone.

Straight line: n. 1. (mathematics term) the shortest distance between two points, for those who are too lazy to search for a space-time wormhole through the universe.

Straight line: n. 2. (scientific term) that which can be drawn through any set of data points on a log-log plot for a sufficiently small interval.

Strategists: n. a group of people who are getting their act together.

Strategy: n. tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do, whereas strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

Strike: n. industrial inaction.

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.

Success: n. 4. the most effective form of revenge for one's enemies.

Suicide: n. is the sincerest form of self-criticism.

Sun: n. nature’s nuclear fusion reactor that is at an arguably safe distance from Earth; it generously affords us 5000 times our current world energy needs and will run reliably over the next billion years with zero downtime.

Sunday school: n. is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Superego: n. an advanced state of self-hood reached only by car park attendants and doctors' receptionists.

Superglue: n. an adhesive of unparalleled strength. Excellent for gluing fingers together and utterly useless for all else.

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.

Sweater n. a garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly.

Sympathy: n. is what one woman offers another in exchange for the juicy details.

System administrator: n. (computing term) a person whose job it is to do everything that isn't his job.

System update: n. (computing term) a quick method of trashing all of your software.

T

Table manners: n. a gastronomic ritual invented by the English, so that good manners at least compensates the lack of good cuisine.

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.

Tact: n. the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

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.

Tariff: n. a scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic produce against the gored of his consumer.

Taste: n. a quality possessed by persons without originality or moral courage.

Tax: n. is what cost you hundreds of dollars when there is a tax increase, but you only save about 30 cents when there is a tax cut.

Tax break: n. a desperate attempt at buying votes, particularly when announced close to an election.

Teacher: n. a person who talks to himself for a living; as opposed to a lunatic, who talks to himself for fun.

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

Tears: n. the hydraulic force by which masculine will-power is defeated by feminine water power.

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.

Technophilia: n. the father of invention.

Teleconference: n. a way of holding an international meeting without having to smell the French.

Telephone plan: n. a form of indentured slavery, where to buy one's freedom from a telephone company comes at a high cost.

Television: n. 1. a more socially acceptable synonym of myopovision.

Television: n. 2. a tiresome advertising portal punctuated with an occasional movie of interest.

Television: n. 3. the orphaned step-child of radio.

Temptation: n. 1. that which goes away when you yield to it.

Temptation: n. 2. is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.

Temptation: n. 3. is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Thief: n. 1. a petty thief is one you hang, but a truly great thief is one you appoint to public office.

Thief: n. 2. a person with a fine eye for opportunity.

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.

Theory: n. (scientific term) is the first term in the Taylor series of practice.

Thermodynamics: n. (scientific term) is just number counting.

Thinking: n. a rearrangement of one's prejudices.

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

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

Time capsule: n. a collection of objects gathered to show our descendants how tasteless and dim-witted we were.

Timetable: n. a list that sets out all the times when a train will definitely not be departing on any particular day.

Today: n. 1. the most obscure part of history.

Today: n. 2. is what will be thought of as part of the Dark Ages.

Today: n. 3. is the tomorrow that you worried about yesterday.

Tolerance: n. 1. is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Tolerance: n. 2. the respect of another fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Tomorrow: n. one of the greatest labour saving devices of today.

Transparency: n. refers to the open flow of information between management and the workers. Now done with such zeal that the workers have no time to read the resulting barrage of emails.

Trial: n. 1. a contest to see who can afford the cleverest lawyer.

Trial: n. 2. a formal inquiry designed to prove and put on record the blameless characters of judges, advocates, and jurors.

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

Truth: n. 2. is that which has only to pass through a few persons to become fiction.

Truth: n. 3. any statement that can't be proved false.

Tyrant: n. a politician who is no longer concealing his ambitions and intentions.

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. 1. a gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.

Ugliness: n. 2. is the guardian of women.

Uncertainty: n. is the thing that makes knowledge interesting.

Unemployed: n. between jobs.

Uniqueness: n. a quality which is not unique itself, as everyone has it.

Universal: n. does not fit anything properly.

Universalist: n. one who forgoes the advantage of a Hell for persons of another faith.

Universe: n. one of God's practical jokes.

University: n. is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

University management: n. a group of failed academics.

Urinal: n. the one place where all men are peers.

Use: n. that which everything has; even uselessness itself.

User friendly: n. of or pertaining to any feature, device or concept that makes perfect sense to a programmer.

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

V

Vacation: n. a perilous journey usually to a far flung destination, transported in a large flying metal tube with wings. Designed to provide respite and refreshment from one's daily toil, but invariably results in jet lag, dysentery, and extra overtime to pay for the said pleasure.

Vegetarian: n. 1. an old tribal word for 'bad hunter.'

Vegetarian: n. 2. a herbivorous individual with Buddhist tendencies. One who rejects the ghoulish concept of forking animal remains down the gullet, preferring to dine upon the corpses of plants and their detachable reproductive organs (popularly known as 'fruit').

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.

Viagra: n. a tiny blue pill that stiffens one's resolve to fight against junk email.

Victim: n. one who colludes with his own downfall.

Victory: n. that which goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.

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. 1. 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.

Video game: n. 2. that which increases a child's imagination if the game involves Italian plumbers knocking out sentient turtles whilst consuming magic mushrooms and which increases retardation if a child repeatedly accesses WWII simulations.

Virtue: n. that which is more enjoyable when a man repents his faults rather than avoiding them.

Virtues: n. pl. certain abstentions.

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.

War: n. 6. a device for maintaining peace between nations, which is at least as sustainable as beating one's wife into maintaining a cordial bedroom relationship.

War: n. 7. the forced acquisition of what one wants from what another has. See rape.

War: n. 8. is where the object is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.

War: n. 9. is that which brings peace, but only to its victims.

War: n. 10. is where fathers bury their sons; as opposed to peace where sons bury their fathers.

War: n. 11. is waged by the rich and it is the poor who die.

War: n. 12. a device whereby chaos amplifies religious and ideological differences, numbing the senses, thereby allowing corporate greed to painlessly thrust through the back door and even seem like pleasure.

War: n. 13. a form of slave labour, where men work themselves to death for the lords of the military-industrial complex in the faint hope they may someday buy their freedom.

War: n. 14. is menstruation envy.

War: n. 15. an opportunity for governments to use up their weapons arsenal before they become obsolete, so they can justify purchasing the latest upgrades for more of the same.

War: n. 16. a brilliant government scheme for addressing declining unemployment figures and avoiding issues of decaying internal infrastructure.

War: n. 17. a time-honoured means for an unpopular government to gain public unity through fear by manufacturing a common enemy.

War: n. 18. the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.

War hero: n. one who sacrificed his life to failed politicians.

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. 1. a subtle signal to single admirers that they should abandon all hope, since the wearer already has.

Wedding ring: n. 2. the world's smallest handcuffs.

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.

Whisky: n. the amber of the gods administered in 700ml installments.

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.

Wickedness: n. is to create a public scandal, as opposed to sinning in private which is no sin at all.

Wife: n. a woman who has ceased to be your girlfriend and resents anyone attempting to fill the vacancy.

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

Windows 95: n. a 32-bit patch to a 16-bit GUI for an 8-bit operating system written for a 4-bit processor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.

Wine: n. 1. is light held together by moisture.

Wine: n. 2. an alcoholic beverage with a rather extreme range in quality. Good wine ruins the pocket; bad wine ruins the stomach. See woman.

Wisdom: n. 1. is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Wisdom: n. 2. the ability to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Wisdom: n. 3. is to know nothing except the fact of one's ignorance.

Wit: n. is educated insolence.

Woman: n. is a disease. An ugly woman is a disease of the stomach, a handsome woman a disease of the head.

Women: n. pl. 1. those which have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.

Women: n. pl. 2. are those that make highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Women: n. pl. 3. are those that don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think—in a deeper voice.

Women: n. pl. 4. are those who Nature has give so much power that the law has wisely given them little.

Women: n. pl. 5. the product of two X-chromosomes, as opposed to men who have only one X-chromosome. Thus half of a man is woman and yet this appears insufficient for mutual understanding.

Words: n. pl. are a device to hide our thoughts.

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

World domination: n. the noblest form of megalomania, as it graciously accepts all the problems that come with it.

Wrath: n. anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, "the Wrath of God," "the day of wrath" etc.

Wrinkles: n. character lines on other people.

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

X

Xenophobia: n. a dislike of those foreign nations that remind us of our own follies. See Projection.

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

Y

Yawn: n. an honest opinion openly expressed.

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.

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