The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs

by Ambrose Bierce

  INSURANCE AGENT: But if your house burns without insurance it will be a total loss.

  HOUSE OWNER: Beg your pardon—by your own actuary’s tables I shall probably have saved, when it burns, all the premiums I would otherwise have paid to you—amounting to more than the face of the policy they would have bought. But suppose it to burn, uninsured, before the time upon which your figures are based. If I could not afford that, how could you if it were insured?

  INSURANCE AGENT: O, we should make ourselves whole from our luckier ventures with other clients. Virtually, they pay your loss.

  HOUSE OWNER: And virtually, then, don’t I help to pay their losses? Are not their houses as likely as mine to burn before they have paid you as much as you must pay them? The case stands this way: you expect to take more money from your clients than you pay to them, do you not?

  INSURANCE AGENT: Certainly; if we did not—

  HOUSE OWNER: I would not trust you with my money. Very well, then. If it is certain, with reference to the whole body of your clients, that they lose money on you it is probable, with reference to any one of them, that he will. It is these individual probabilities that make the aggregate certainty.

  INSURANCE AGENT: I will not deny it—but look at the figures in this pamph—

  HOUSE OWNER: Heaven forbid!

  INSURANCE AGENT: You spoke of saving the premiums which you would otherwise pay to me. Will you not be more likely to squander them? We offer you an incentive to thrift.

  HOUSE OWNER: The willingness of A to take care of B’s money is not peculiar to insurance, but as a charitable institution you command esteem. Deign to accept its expression from a Deserving Object.

  INSURRECTION, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection’s failure to substitute misrule for bad government.

  INTENTION, n. The mind’s sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

  INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter’s advantage for the other to have said.

  INTERREGNUM, n. The period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne. The experiment of letting the spot grow cold has commonly been attended by most unhappy results from the zeal of many worthy persons to make it warm again.

  INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

  Two Seidlitz powders, one in blue

  And one in white, together drew,

  And having each a pleasant sense

  Of t’other powder’s excellence,

  Forsook their jackets for the snug

  Enjoyment of a common mug.

  So close their intimacy grew

  One paper would have held the two.

  To confidences straight they fell,

  Less anxious each to hear than tell;

  Then each remorsefully confessed

  To all the virtues he possessed,

  Acknowledging he had them in

  So high degree it was a sin.

  The more they said, the more they felt

  Their spirits with emotion melt,

  Till tears of sentiment expressed

  Their feelings. Then they effervesced!

  So Nature executes her feats

  Of wrath on friends and sympathetes

  The good old rule who won’t apply,

  That you are you and I am I.

  INTRODUCTION, n. A social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this country, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus:

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another’s happiness with a running pack of strangers.”

  INVENTOR, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

  IRRELIGION, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.

  ITCH, n. The patriotism of a Scotchman.

  J

  J is a consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel—than which nothing could be more absurd. Its original form, which has been but slightly modified, was that of the tail of a subdued dog, and it was not a letter but a character, standing for a Latin verb, jacere, “to throw,” because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog’s tail assumes that shape. This is the origin of the letter, as expounded by the renowned Dr. Jocolpus Bumer, of the University of Belgrade, who established his conclusions on the subject in a work of three quarto volumes and committed suicide on being reminded that the j in the Roman alphabet had originally no curl.

  JEALOUS, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

  JESTER, n. An officer formerly attached to a king’s household, whose business it was to amuse the court by ludicrous actions and utterances, the absurdity being attested by his motley costume. The king himself being attired with dignity, it took the world some centuries to discover that his own conduct and decrees were sufficiently ridiculous for the amusement not only of his court but of all mankind. The jester was commonly called a fool, but the poets and romancers have ever delighted to represent him as a singularly wise and witty person. In the circus of to-day the melancholy ghost of the court fool effects the dejection of humbler audiences with the same jests wherewith in life he gloomed the marble hall, panged the patrician sense of humor and tapped the tank of royal tears.

  The widow-queen of Portugal

  Had an audacious jester

  Who entered the confessional

  Disguised, and there confessed her.

  “Father,” she said, “thine ear bend down—

  My sins are more than scarlet:

  I love my fool—blaspheming clown,

  And common, base-born varlet.”

  “Daughter,” the mimic priest replied,

  “That sin, indeed, is awful:

  The church’s pardon is denied

  To love that is unlawful.

  “But since thy stubborn heart will be

  For him forever pleading,

  Thou’dst better make him, by decree,

  A man of birth and breeding.”

  She made the fool a duke, in hope

  With Heaven’s taboo to palter;

  Then told a priest, who told the Pope,

  Who damned her from the altar!

  Barel Dort.

  JEWS-HARP, n. An unmusical instrument, played by holding it fast with the teeth and trying to brush it away with the finger.

  JOSS-STICKS, n. Small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain sacred rites of our holy religion.

  JUSTICE, n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

  K

  K is a consonant that we get from the Greeks, but it can be traced away back beyond them to the Cerathians, a small commercial nation inhabiting the peninsula of Smero. In their tongue it was called Klatch, which means “destroyed.” The form of the letter was originally precisely that of our H, but the erudite Dr. Snedeker explains that it was altered to its present shape to commemorate the destruction of th
e great temple of Jarute by an earthquake, circa 730 B.C. This building was famous for the two lofty columns of its portico, one of which was broken in half by the catastrophe, the other remaining intact. As the earlier form of the letter is supposed to have been suggested by these pillars, so, it is thought by the great antiquary, its later was adopted as a simple and natural—not to say touching—means of keeping the calamity ever in the national memory. It is not known if the name of the letter was altered as an additional mnemonic, or if the name was always Klatch and the destruction one of nature’s puns. As each theory seems probable enough, I see no objection to believing both—and Dr. Snedeker arrayed himself on that side of the question.

  KEEP, v. t.

  He willed away his whole estate,

  And then in death he fell asleep,

  Murmuring: “Well, at any rate,

  My name unblemished I shall keep.”

  But when upon the tomb ’twas wrought

  Whose was it?—for the dead keep naught.

  Durang Gophel Arn.

  KILL, v. t. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

  KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.

  KINDNESS, n. A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.

  KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a “crowned head,” although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

  A king, in times long, long gone by,

  Said to his lazy jester:

  “If I were you and you were I

  My moments merrily would fly—

  No care nor grief to pester.”

  “The reason, Sire, that you would thrive,”

  The fool said—“if you’ll hear it—

  Is that of all the fools alive

  Who own you for their sovereign, I’ve

  The most forgiving spirit.”

  Oogum Bem.

  KING’S EVIL, n. A malady that was formerly cured by the touch of the sovereign, but has now to be treated by the physicians. Thus “the most pious Edward” of England used to lay his royal hand upon his ailing subjects and make them whole—

  a crowd of wretched souls

  That stay his cure: their malady convinces

  The great essay of art; but at his touch,

  Such sanctity hath Heaven given his hand,

  They presently amend,

  as the “Doctor” in Macbeth hath it. This useful property of the royal hand could, it appears, be transmitted along with other crown properties; for according to “Malcolm,”

  ’tis spoken,

  To the succeeding royalty he leaves

  The healing benediction.

  But the gift somewhere dropped out of the line of succession: the later sovereigns of England have not been tactual healers, and the disease once honored with the name “king’s evil” now bears the humbler one of “scrofula,” from scrofa, a sow. The date and author of the following epigram are known only to the author of this dictionary, but it is old enough to show that the jest about Scotland’s national disorder is not a thing of yesterday.

  Ye Kynge his evill in me laye,

  Wh. he of Scottlande charmed awaye.

  He layde his hand on mine and sayd:

  “Be gone!” Ye ill no longer stayd.

  But O ye wofull plyght in wh.

  I’m now y-pight: I have ye itche!

  The superstition that maladies can be cured by royal taction is dead, but like many a departed conviction it has left a monument of custom to keep its memory green. The practice of forming in line and shaking the President’s hand had no other origin, and when that great dignitary bestows his healing salutation on

  strangely visited people,

  All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,

  The mere despair of surgery,

  he and his patients are handing along an extinguished torch which once was kindled at the altar-fire of a faith long held by all classes of men. It is a beautiful and edifying “survival”—one which brings the sainted past close home to our “business and bosoms.”

  KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for “bliss.” It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.

  KLEPTOMANIAC, n. A rich thief.

  KNIGHT, n.

  Once a warrior gentle of birth,

  Then a person of civic worth,

  Now a fellow to move our mirth.

  Warrior, person, and fellow—no more:

  We must knight our dogs to get any lower.

  Brave Knights Kennelers then shall be,

  Noble Knights of the Golden Flea,

  Knights of the Order of St. Steboy,

  Knights of St. Gorge and Sir Knights Jawy.

  God speed the day when this knighting fad

  Shall go to the dogs and the dogs go mad.

  KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

  L

  LABOR, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

  LAND, n. A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.

  A life on the ocean wave,

  A home on the rolling deep,

  For the spark that nature gave

  I have there the right to keep.

  They give me the cat-o’-nine

  Whenever I go ashore.

  Then ho! for the flashing brine—

  I’m a natural commodore!

  Dodle.

  LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.

  LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest of that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents. The skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over brute inertia.

  LAP, n. One of the most important organs of the female system—an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal’s substantial welfare.

  LAST, n. A shoemaker’s implement, named by a frowning Providence as opportunity to the maker of puns.

  Ah, punster, would my lot were cast,

  Where the cobbler is unknown,

  So that I might forget his last

  And hear your own.

  Gargo Repsky.

  LAUGHTER, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals—these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infectious character of laughter is due to instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.

  LAUREATE, adj. Crown
ed with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign’s court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral. Of all incumbents of that high office, Robert Southey had the most notable knack at drugging the Samson of public joy and cutting his hair to the quick; and he had an artistic color-sense which enabled him so to blacken a public grief as to give it the aspect of a national crime.

  LAUREL, n. The laurus, a vegetable dedicated to Apollo, and formerly defoliated to wreathe the brows of victors and such poets as had influence at court. (Vide supra.)

  LAW, n.

  Once Law was sitting on the bench,

  And Mercy knelt a-weeping.

  “Clear out!” he cried, “disordered wench!

  Nor come before me creeping.

  Upon your knees if you appear,

  ’Tis plain you have no standing here.”

  Then Justice came. His Honor cried:

  “Your status?—devil seize you!”

  “Amica curiae,” she replied—

  “Friend of the court, so please you.”

  “Begone!” he shouted—“there’s the door—

  I never saw your face before!”

  G. J.

  LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.

  LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

  LAZINESS, n. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

  LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light lovers—particularly to those who love not wisely but other men’s wives. Lead is also of great service as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities.

  Hail, holy Lead!—of human feuds the great

  And universal arbiter; endowed

  With penetration to pierce any cloud

  Fogging the field of controversial hate,

  And with a swift, inevitable, straight,

  Searching precision find the unavowed

  But vital point. Thy judgment, when allowed