For their help in the compilation, translation and editation of this document, the author wishes to thank (in no particular order) the Greater London Council (deceased), Scafell Pike, clogs, Octavian Caesar, and Thomas Crapper. The task would have been a lot harder without some of those listed above.

Femme Fatale
A dead actress.

Monsoon
Useful for washing dishes. Simply peg them up in the storm, and leave to dry when rain has ceased.

Continental Drift
This is a fallacy. Lie on the beach, and look carefully at a fixed reference point out to sea. Notice that the land isn’t moving. If the continents were designed to roam the surface of the earth, they would have been provided with sails.

Paper
A cellulose based life form. Paper chasing paper. Paperwork begets more paperwork. Tissues get thicker. Newspapers smaller. Administration costs increase. See?

Leamington Spa
The true location of the Holy Land.

Shallots
Subnormal onions.

Information
Information does not exist. Many have tried to categorise it, build systems around it and generally sodomise it. Information is a purely artificial concept, invented to provide a framework upon which to build ideas. These ideas are therefore null and void, being based on a non-existent substrate. Houses are made from stone, and can be pushed over with enough force. Ideas are made from information, and can be kicked into insignificance with enough irrelevant arguments. But here the similarity ends, for you cannot live in an idea.

Permanent markers
If such things existed, the Earth would have an initial scrawled upon it so that it could be recognised in the celestial refrigerator.

Interference
Everything is interfered with in some way, so therefore everything is interference. An object that is not being interfered with in any way does not do anything (e.g. dog in a void). Also, an object that is subjected to an arbitrary number of equivalent interference values is incapable of moving in any direction (e.g. a parish council). From this we surmise that everything must try its hardest to interfere faster and harder with others than all other interferons. It is only in this manner that anything can be achieved.

Fiction
How do we know fiction isn’t true? In an infinite universe, everything is possible. So don’t lie to children by telling them it isn’t true, you bastards.

Native peoples
These don’t exist. Everyone has come from somewhere else, and trampled other civilisations in their paths. One exception is the Fwantangelite tribe of Lower Slaughter, Glos. This slightly confused collective is an example of parallel evolution.

Frogs
Don’t exist. Look carefully. See?

Volcanoes
Before time began, the prevalent life forms measured duration in heat. Therefore when it was ten to boiling, it was time to go to bed. Volcanoes are the remnants of this pre-cambrian ecosystem. They are antiques from a stage in this civilisation’s development that is analogous to humanity’s Regency period.

Fast food
It isn’t food at all. The fast food corporations have discovered a particular family of proteins that, although filling, have no nutritional value whatsoever.

Crayons
Pencils for clumsy people.

Rain
Water, but smaller.

Standard of Living
The normally recognised standard of living is to be biologically active. Any more than this is a bonus, so stop whinging.

Poultry
An obscure avian joke.

Books
Books are collections of words, which represent ideas. As has been stated before, ideas are not equivalent to houses. However, books can be built into houses. These houses, though, will only be solid if they contain ideas which are not based on information (which was proved earlier not to exist). Therefore, a book is only useful in any context if it contains no information. Unless it is informing you how to make stone.

Usefulness
A highly prized characteristic. Usefulness lends solidity to the object concerned. If it is not useful, it is not worth considering, it can be erased from the universe and therefore does not exist. Only useful objects exist, then. Unfortunately for purists, information is a subjective quantifier. Harking back to earlier statements, lawyers find the law useful, but others see it as a non-useful concept. Because it must exist for some, others choose subconsciously to mask its appearance with something less offensive.

Aubergines
The frontier between vegetable and animal. Aubergines are very shy creatures that spend most of their lives in their vegetable state. Those lucky enough not to be harvested, burnt and masticated become a variant form of fast dancers.

Fast dancers
A large family of mythical creatures that move so rapidly that only the highly keen eyed can even catch a glimpse of them. An eyewitness account from Gashmonkey of Lichfield reads ‘Thay they were, all horns best o’em upon t’eds. Reach f’monk brass und table. Spuzz say ‘mouffe!’ but oi belly nowt. Ne’ermoind sagt mon. Tea solved’.

Flight
Mankind always aspires to fly, like a bird some say. Well, birds don’t fly. They just have a different idea of where the ground is.

Levers
Levers are used to move heavy objects. Contrary to popular belief, the effectiveness of the lever does not depend on the amount of weight placed on it, or the distance of the pivot. It actually depends (in large scale scenarios) on the presence of a shrunken, sexless human wearing a shawl and army boots, ready to dole out tea at a moment’s notice.

Ink
When a pen is clasped tightly, it sweats. It is this sweat which stains the paper with words and pictures. Proof of this is the squid, which is a distant relative of the pen. Both sweat when nervous, anxious or bored (pens find shirt pockets to be an extremely dull environment).

Postboxes
These are a gateway to another world. That’s all I'm going to say.

Cheese
Hard milk.

Carpet
To lay a carpet is to proclaim independence. On moving into a middle-class neighbourhood, everyone is willing to lend a hand in the settling-in process, making tea and soup and semi-sponges. However, once one lays a new carpet, one is immediately snubbed, and snide remarks regarding tatty kid’s shoes and bad bikes are bandied around.

Semi-sponges
A special form of cake created by people in a hurry.

Thirty-Eight Rebellion
Sandwiched between the two Jacobite rebellions (in 1715 and 1745), caused when the Old and Young Pretenders attempted to claim the British throne, was the unsuccessful uprising instituted by the Middle-Aged Pretender. This man was named Titus Reginald Smith, and lived a happy and comfortable life in Thetford until one of his friends suggested that he snatch the throne from the Hanovers. Taking this inebriated banter seriously, Titus raised his standard at Brentwood, and marched on London. His force is described by Herbert Bannersley-Lancaster:
“2778 men of Anglia, 144 horses, 1899 agricultural implements and a small dog named Brian.”
Unsurprisingly, he failed.

Currency
It’s just paper. Why not deal in nuts and road signs?

Wars Of The Roses
No, they’re all wrong. It wasn’t about politics, it was about the gardening monopoly held by the Northumberland Bloom Company.

Law
Law is created by lawyers for lawyers. Their financial renumeration depends upon non-lawyers becoming caught in specially set legal traps. If all non-lawyers ignored the law, the lawyers would receive no money, and be forced into proper employment instead. Hence the problem would be solved.

Art
Art serves several purposes – to entertain, to inform, and to make sad, unfortunate and rather useless people to feel good about themselves for a couple of minutes. Don’t indulge these people. There’s nothing a boot camp can’t solve.

Tax
What a con. Pays for people who are worse off than you to continue being worse off by giving them a cushion upon which to sit while doing nothing.

Religion
Give up. Spend your money on something more useful, like mini fireworks. Religious groups have managed to create more suffering in the human race than cars, jam and boy bands put together. Perhaps if you stopped bitching about different interpretations and practised what you preached then we’d all be spared Thought For The Day.