Number 43
Remember Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary? Read these two excerpts from it and decide whether you think Bierce was funny and cynical, or honest and tragic:
ABORIGINES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.
I would never have thought my dad could have possibly had anything in common with Ambrose Bierce, but when I was a little kid, he tried to explain to me that there was no such thing as a traffic accident. Someone was always at fault, he said. I thought that was too cruel, and surely we could allow for acts of God. But he and Bierce were on to something.
Bierce wrote a Civil War story called "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," later made into a wonderful short movie, which in turned aired as a "Twilight Zone" episode.
In 1913, Bierce went to Mexico with a "definite purpose in mind," he said, which he could not disclose to anyone. He was never heard from again. This always struck me as funny, especially when I considered the various definite purposes I myself entertained from time to time. (It is thought that he may have died fighting alongside Pancho Villa on January 11, 1914. My dad was born January 11, 1918. Coincidence? You be the judge.)
Samuel Johnson, too, is famous for his dictionary, which one online critic calls "surprisingly relevant today." (Why surprisingly? So many people assume that anything that preceded their own birth cannot be "relevant," as if the world began when they did.) The following two definitions are famous, and show respectively Johnson's sardonic social commentary and the precision of his mind.
OATS. n.s. [a_en, Saxon.] A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
(Note: The English don't appreciate good cornbread either.)
NETWORK. Any thing reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.
One entry in Johnson's dictionary reminds me that an earlier meaning of the word "sex" (usually expressed as "the sex") was "females," as illustrated by this quote:
Shame is hard to be overcome; but if the sex once get the better of it, it gives them afterwards no more trouble. ~ Garth.
It need not be said that this usage had to have been originated by the other sex (the unsex? the antisex?).
I was reminded of Bierce and Johnson when I read "From 'Activist' to 'Warmonger', A handy glossary from Lucifer's latest lexicographer" by John Derbyshire, in the September 29, 2003 issue of National Review. Derbyshire defines "terms current in the media today [with] the least charitable possible interpretation." He belabors the political issues in a heavy-handed and obvious way, but is occasionally amusing. These are my favorites from his two-page glossary:
INAPPROPRIATE, adj. True, but unmentionable for political reasons.
MARRIAGE, n. An archaic institution for the oppression of women and the abuse of children, from participation in which homosexual couples are cruelly and unjustly barred.
POETRY, n. A form of writing, in which the random thoughts of a self-obsessed person are arranged on a page in such a way that they cannot be mistaken for prose.
SIMPLISTIC, adj. Predicated on the belief, or apparent belief, that good and evil differ from each other in some fashion.
SELF-ESTEEM, n. The mental state formerly known as "the sin of pride."
Now here's your homework assignment:
The narrator of a TV documentary on the plague said, "We ask the imponderable question, why did some survive the plague?" Well, of course it was and is a totally ponderable question. That's what the show was about. People pondered the question, then they did research, then they came up with a surprising and interesting answer. (See the PBS site on the show.)
Another homework assignment:
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