The Devil's Dictionary

WEATHER, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.

Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,

And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be —

Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,

With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth.

While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incadescent youth,

From the coals that he’d preferred to the advantages of truth.

He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote

On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote —

For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:

“Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow.”

Halcyon Jones

WEDDING, n. A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.

WEREWOLF, n. A wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane and is consistent with an acquired taste for human flesh.

Some Bavarian peasants having caught a wolf one evening, tied it to a post by the tail and went to bed. The next morning nothing was there! Greatly perplexed, they consulted the local priest, who told them that their captive was undoubtedly a werewolf and had resumed its human for during the night. “The next time that you take a wolf,” the good man said, “see that you chain it by the leg, and in the morning you will find a Lutheran.”

WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected affliction that strikes hard.

Should you ask me whence this laughter,

Whence this audible big-smiling,

With its labial extension,

With its maxillar distortion

And its diaphragmic rhythmus

Like the billowing of an ocean,

Like the shaking of a carpet,

I should answer, I should tell you:

From the great deeps of the spirit,

From the unplummeted abysmus

Of the soul this laughter welleth

As the fountain, the gug-guggle,

Like the river from the canon [sic],

To entoken and give warning

That my present mood is sunny.

Should you ask me further question —

Why the great deeps of the spirit,

Why the unplummeted abysmus

Of the soule extrudes this laughter,

This all audible big-smiling,

I should answer, I should tell you

With a white heart, tumpitumpy,

With a true tongue, honest Injun:

William Bryan, he has Caught It,

Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

Is’t the sandhill crane, the shankank,

Standing in the marsh, the kneedeep,

Standing silent in the kneedeep

With his wing-tips crossed behind him

And his neck close-reefed before him,

With his bill, his william, buried

In the down upon his bosom,

With his head retracted inly,

While his shoulders overlook it?

Does the sandhill crane, the shankank,

Shiver grayly in the north wind,

Wishing he had died when little,

As the sparrow, the chipchip, does?

No ‘tis not the Shankank standing,

Standing in the gray and dismal

Marsh, the gray and dismal kneedeep.

No, ‘tis peerless William Bryan

Realizing that he’s Caught It,

Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

WHEAT, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are said to eat more bread per capita of population than any other people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable.

WHITE, adj. and n. Black.

WIDOW, n. A pathetic figure that the Christian world has agreed to take humorously, although Christ’s tenderness towards widows was one of the most marked features of his character.

WINE, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women’s Christian Union as “liquor,” sometimes as “rum.” Wine, madam, is God’s next best gift to man.

WIT, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

WITCH, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

WITTICISM, n. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted, and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a “joke.”

WOMAN, n.

An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a

rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by

many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility

acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the

postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion,

deny the virtue and declare that such as creation’s dawn beheld,

it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all

beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from

Greeland’s spicy mountains to India’s moral strand. The popular