The Devil’s Dictionary
For logophiles like myself there is nothing better than a lexicographer who takes a sardonic and humorous approach to the task of defining words that adorn our English language. One of the finest is the American poet, short story writer, journalist and sometime lexicographer is Ambrose Pierce (1842 – 1914). His peculiar take on life may have come from his upbringing, he was one of thirteen children all of whose names began with the letter A at his father’s insistence. For his sardonic wit and no-nonsense style, he was known as “the wickedest man in San Francisco”.
It seems appropriate to begin our dip into his lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, which started out as occasional newspaper articles and then was published in book form in 1906, with that letter.
Abdication, Bierce defines, as “an act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high temperature of the throne”. Perhaps it is a rather regal form of absenteeism, defined as someone “with an income who has had the forethought to remove himself from the sphere of exaction”.
Bierce poured his customary scorn on an abstainer calling them “a weak person who yields himself to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others”.
An accident, he noted, was “an inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws”. Bierce was not a fan of lawyers and went to town in his definition of an accomplice. “One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney’s position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting”.
An accordion he defines as “an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin”, a sentiment with which I concur. You could add the bagpipes to that. Accountability is a management buzzword these days. For Bierce it was “the mother of caution”. Many a true word is spoken in jest.
