The Roycroft Dictionary, Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days.

Purgatory: Two telephone systems in one town.

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

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

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

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

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

Popularity: The triumph of the commonplace.

Prophets: The advance couriers of Time.

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

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

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

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

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

Relaxation: The first requirement of strength.

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

Race Problem: Picking the winner.

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

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

Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions.

Religion: Philosophy touched with emotion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectability: The dickey on the bosom of civilization.

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

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

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

Revival: Religion with a vaudeville attachment.

Roosevelt (Theodore): A harangue-outang.

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

SACRILEGE: 1. Any impolite act in the presence of a Humbug. 2. To shock the sensibilities of a Nobody. 3. To kill a mystical Mule or swap jokes in public with a Ghost.

Sacred Soil: That which is well tilled.

Saint: 1. Generally speaking, a person who retires into the wilderness of the spirit in order to coddle a ruling weakness. 2. To become polite toward God and His universe. 3. A steeplejack on miraged minarets.

Saintship: The exclusive possession of those who have either worn out or never had the capacity to sin.

Sanity: The ability to do team-work.

Saloon: The poor man's club; run with intent to make the poor man poorer.

Savages: Men who like to go to war.

Sanatorium: The place where a man is sent who has money, as opposed to "Bughouse," meaning the place where a man is sent who has no bank-balance.

Satirist: 1. A taxidermist of the Past, Present and Future; one who disembowels, stuffs and mounts all the gods, living and dead; one who fills up with straw and sawdust all illusions. 2. An esoteric mimic. 3. A being with an eye in the back of his head. 4. A postlude to the day's funeral march; a prelude to freedom.

Scandal: Gossip related by a small-bore.

Salvation: Redemption from a belief in miracles.

Scholar: 1. An ornate fossil. 2. A deadly ptomain that infests all forms of dynamic thought. 3. An impenetrable mass of matter that contains within itself the principle of unchangeability. 4. A turtle on whose shell is carved certain hieroglyphic lettering; such as, Ph. D., M. D., LL. D. 5. A medieval owl that roosts in universities, especially those that are endowed. 6. A plaster-of-Paris convolute. 7. A man, long on advice but short on action, who thinks he thinks. 8. One who draws his breath and salary. 9. Anybody with a bulging brow and no visible means of support.

Self-Reliance: The name we give to the egotism of the man who succeeds.

School: A training-place – mental, physical, moral. Good boys are boys at work. Bad boys are good boys who misdirect their energies.

Science: 1. The knowledge of the common people classified and carried one step further. 2. Accurate organized knowledge founded on fact. 3. Classified superstition.

Secret: 1. A thing we give to others to keep for us. 2. Something known only to a few.

Seer: The scout of civilization.

Self-Control: The ability to restrain a laugh at the wrong place.

Silence: A trick of the human gullet that conceals weakness or emptiness.

Sheeny: A Jew who has more money than you have.

Shoal: Shallow, literary, theological. (By extension, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and some other universities are sometimes called shoal-marks.)

Sincerity: 1. A mental attitude acquired after long practise by man, in order to conceal his ulterior motives. 2. To be childish, to be senile. 3. To lack invention, imagination or character. (A sincere man is one who bluffs only a part of the time.)

Sin: Perverted power. The man without capacity for sin has no ability to do good – isn't that so? His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither ameba nor fish, neither noxious bacilli nor useful life.

Servility: 1. The instinct of superiority in its lowest form. 2. The politician's virtue. 3. A means of getting on. 4. A natural law, the violation of which makes one famous and poor.

Sherman Act: A scheme to entrap men who set large numbers of people to work at employment profitable to everybody concerned.

Sober: 1. To be bored, unhappy, "all in." 2. To be born or live in Philadelphia. 3. To be without money, to be destitute. 4. To die. E. g., "Thank God, I am sober at last!" Dying words of Potodorus in Two Gentlemen of Yonkers.

Scotch: A verb meaning with care.

Self-Protection: The first law of life.

Socialist: 1. A person easily peeved. 2. In economics, a school of thought founded by Cain. 3. A man who, so far as he himself is concerned, considers a thing done when he has suggested it.

Smack: A crude, rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory substitute for a kiss.

Society: 1. An erotic clique that reads Vogue, Smart Set and Town Topics. 2. A congregation of people who are not persons. 3. A vast interchange of service through labor, ideas and commodities. 4. A relish for solitude.

Socialism: 1. A sincere, sentimental, beneficent theory, which has but one objection, and that is, it will not work. 2. A plan by which the inefficient, irresponsible, ineffective, unemployable and unworthy will thrive without industry, persistence or economy. 3. An earnest effort to get Nature to change the rules for the benefit of those who are tired of the Game. 4. A social and economic scheme of government by which man shall loiter rather than labor. 5. A survival of the unfit. 6. A device for swimming without going near the H2O.. 7. Participation in profits without responsibility as to deficits. 8. An arrangement for destroying initiative, invention, creation and originality. 9. Resolutions passed by a committee as a substitute for work. 10. A sentiment which encouraged and evolved would lead to revolution, with dynamiting and destruction as a prominent and recognized part of its propaganda. 11. A system for turning water into wine, kerosene into oyster-soup, and boulders into bread, by passing resolutions.

Sociology: The religious application of economics.

Sorrow: The magical palette upon which Life mixes her colors.

Slave: A person with a servile mind, who quickly crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning; who gratifies his wants either through cringing flattery or coercion, and who tyrannizes over others whenever he has a chance.

Specialist: 1. One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance, and gets further into a bog than the man ahead of him. 2. A kind of hypnotic trance wherein a person by centering his gaze on a given object renders the object smaller in proportion as his illusion grows.

Sorehead: A politician who has reached for something that was not his, and missed.

Solitude: The only thing that can hold the balance true.

Sorcerer: 1. Any one who can make the people of the United States believe they rule. 2. A juggler (hence the founder of any religious, political or philosophical system).

Specious: That form of argument used as an indoor sport by East Aurora natives in an attempt to prove that two or three make four.

Sorcery: The art of charming money out of the pockets of those who do not desire to part with it.

Spinsterhood: An achievement, not a disgrace.

Stall Stuff: 1. Things said to see what the other person will say. 2. The language used by politicians. 3. All conversation between spoons. Example: Seeing Mr. Jones leave his office, you enter and ask his stenographer this question: "Is Mr. Jones in?" (See Piffle, Pink Tea, Four o'Clock.)

Star: 1. A milestone in the Infinite. 2. A malicious, ironic eye. 3. A device to show man his insignificance.

Starvation: 1. The originator of thought. 2. A way to salvation. 3. A physical eccentricity of the stomach. 4. A cure for indigestion. 5. A banting process invented by Lazarus.

Specialization: The ability to focus all your energies on one thing.

Studio: 1. A place where a model is borne to blush unseen, and contract pneumonia in the chilly air. 2. A rendezvous of would-bes, has-beens and never-wazzers. 3. A place to study the esoteric. 4. The most polite term you can apply to it.

Stupidity: 1. The Utopia of the wise, the Lethe forbidden to the lips of genius. 2. The driving power of a Mass in motion. 3. An incurable state of somnambulism with which mankind is blessed, and under the spell of which it performs the most fantastic actions, such as marriage, balloting, warring, preaching, selling, buying, baptizing. 4. The leit-motif of the Vaudeville called Progressiveness.

Superstition: 1. Scrambled science flavored with fear. 2. Ossified metaphor.

Surgery: An adjunct, more or less valuable to the diagnostician.

Style: 1. The brogue of the mind. 2. A certain manner or deportment which emanates from those who have neither manner nor deportment. 3. A peculiar and individual manner of doing the unnecessary.

Subsidiary: A competitor who has come off his perch through threats or bribes, or both.

Success: 1. A sunset by Turner. 2. A stained-glass window through which one may see an ironic moon. 3. The final link in a chain of chalk. 4. To rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession. 5. An inability to further fletcherize. 6. Giving up the fight, being possessed of the fallacy that you have won. 7. Death's lullaby. 8. The accomplishment of one's best. 9. To write your name high upon the outhouse of a country tavern. 10. A constant sense of discontent, broken by brief periods of satisfaction on doing some specially good piece of work. 11. A matter of outliving your sins. 12. A subtle connivance of Nature for bringing about a man's defeat. 13. The realization of the estimate which you place upon yourself. 14. Voltage under control – keeping one hand on the transformer of your Kosmic Kilowatts. 15. A matter of the red corpuscle. 16. The thing that spoils many a good failure. 17. Something that is hideous to all but its victims.

Suction: An automatic, murderous and perpetual movement of Society against each individual.

Supernatural: The natural not yet understood.

Sun: 1. A giant spot-light, which from the wings of space plays intermittently upon a meaningless ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville show. 2. The root of all evil, the mother of all beauty, and the final tomb of all that is good, bad or indifferent. 3. A dyehouse, probably the first. (The sun was once worshiped as a divinity, but later the competition between gods and divinities became so strenuous that the sun was forgotten, hence his casual earthquakes, floods and other little reminders that we and our gods are only his gimcracks.)

Statute: The proof, record and final justification of the infallibility of Ignorance.

Strong Man: One who busies himself with the useful tasks that others can not, or will not do, and allows those who can do nothing else to do the easy things.

Sympathy: 1. A malady that sometimes afflicts the rich. 2. The lees of the wine-cup offered to another. 3. An impulse toward ourselves through the heart of another. 4. Whatever may be extended to another that does not take the shape of money. 5. The sum of all virtues. 6. The first attribute of love as well as its last. (I am not sure but that sympathy is love's own self, vitalized mayhap by some divine actinic ray. Only the souls who have suffered are well loved.)

TEACHER: 1. A person, either male or female, who instils into the head of another person, either voluntarily or for pay, the sum and substance of his or her ignorance. 2. One who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

Talk: To open and close the mouth rapidly while the bellows in the throat pumps out the gas in the brain.

Taftian: Any man who is too cowardly to fight, and too fat to run.

Temptation: A desire to do something you know you should not do.

Theological Seminary: A place where young men are taught to silence the questions of the ignorant.

Temple: A place other than a bed, where one takes one's shoes off. (There are Jewish temples, pagan temples and money temples, but no Christian temples: the latter has no need of them, because Christian religion is the only one in the world in which its believers and followers practise exactly what its Founder taught. Each Christian may point to himself and say proudly, "Ecce Temple," hence, etc., etc., etc.)

The Philistine: A publication that puts the Syracuse Product on the terminal feathers of the Idea Bird.

The-Scene-Changes: A device invented by a writer who was running short of Cosmic Gasoline.

Tomorrow: The mother of regret.

Thanksgiving: 1. A mass said for the repose of the living. 2. Gratitude in the presence of the death of some one else. 3. The irony of fatality. 4. The instinctive and perpetual atavism of the Will-to-Live. (Thanksgiving-Day in the United States is a national holiday on which all the people who during the past year have survived earthquake, fire, housemaid's knee and death, overeat and thus thank God for His favoritism.)

Tightwadity: A disease in which one dollar obstructs the vision to the exclusion of a higher denomination.

Tolerance: An agreement to tolerate intolerance.

Today: The hearse that carries the dreams of yesterday to the cemetery.

The: An article, aristocratic by birth and breeding, but which degenerates into an adjective in the sentence, "He is THE man of the hour."

Theology: 1. A hideous juggernaut to whose wheels cling the blood and bone and the flattened flesh of a million dead emotions. 2. Not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. 3. Obsolete psychology, or the arbitrary rule of a Theos or god. 4. An engine planned for the purpose of bewildering humanity. 5. Self-deceived egotism, hiding behind the name of Deity. 6. Antique and obsolete philosophy. 7. The science of a non-existent, all-powerful, all-wise and all-loving nix.

Thinker: 1. One who destroys philosophies. 2. One who can make others think.

Thought: 1. Something made up of the thoughts you, yourself, think. The other kind is supplied to you by jobbers. 2. Mental dynamite.

Time: 1. The press-agent of genius. 2. An eternal guest that banquets on our ideals and bodies. 3. In the theater of the gods a moving-picture film that reproduces the cosmic comedy. 4. A metaphysical entity that made the Ingersoll watch a physical possibility. 5. A loafer playing at tenpins. 6. An illusion – to orators. 7. The solvent and the dissolver of all. (Time was anciently symbolized by Kronos; today it is symbolized by the mystical syllables, So-Much-Per. The word has also undergone strange etymological changes. Anciently, time was singular, but since the advent of the Unions, we have "time and a third," "double time," etc.)

Tomb: A place for the deposit of the dead. (See College, Newspaper Office, Philadelphia Club, Legation, etc.)

Top-Notcher: An individual who works only for the interest of the institution of which he is a part, not against it.

Total Depravity: The greatest idea for the acquisition of power and pelf ever devised.

Trouble: 1. A hallucination that affords a sweet satisfaction to the possessor. 2. Any interesting topic of conversation. 3. A plan of Nature whereby a person is diverted from the humiliation of seeing himself as others see him. (An impressario's troubles begin when the prima donna kicks and the ladies of the ballet won't.)

Trumpet: A musical instrument which in the mouth of Gabriel will bring to life for their eternal undoing all Shylocks, officeholders, editorial writers, landlords, and professional epigrammatists.

Title: 1. A Pantheon of royal ciphers. 2. Anything superimposed on a superfluity.

Truth: 1. A universal error. 2. A relation between one illusion (the outer world) and another (the inner world). 3. A prejudice raised to an axiom. 4. Something that a few will die for. 5. That which serves us best in expressing our lives. (A rotting log is truth to a bed of violets; while sand is truth to a cactus.) 6. Anything which happened, might have happened, or which will possibly happen. 7. The opinion that still survives. 8. An imaginary line dividing error into two parts.

Tradition: 1. Salvation through ossification; redemption through folklore; a fetter for the foolish. 2. A clock that tells what time it was. 3. A method of holding the many back while some man does the thing which they declare is impossible.

UNIVERSITY: 1. An institution for the prevention of learning. 2. A place where rich men send their sons who have no aptitude for business. 3. A plan for the elimination of physical culture and the exaltation of athletics. 4. A literary, gonococci culture-bed. 5. A collection of buildings which emit the odor of the classics and omit the odor of sanctity. 6. A place wherein the youthful mind is taught the danger of thinking.

Union Labor: A force which unchecked would develop into violent and destructive anarchy.

United States of America: Miss District de Columbia and her forty-eight Subsidiaries.

Unrequited: (Used generally with the word love.) Inability to make both ends meet.

Utopian: A person who demands that you shall live up to his ideals.

Unpardonable Sin: Neglecting to close the screen-door.

Up to Date: To be far behind the Ancients, who were generally ahead of the current date. E. g., "This thing would never have happened if I had only been up to date, but I tried to be dateless." – Last words of Socrates.

Utopia: A place where you have but to suggest a thing, to consider it done; a condition where all things are supplied on slipping a wish into a slot.