DICTATOR, n. The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of despotism to the plague of anarchy.
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TREE, n. A tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal apparatus, though through a miscarriage of justice most trees bear only a negligible fruit, or none at all. When naturally fruited, the tree is a beneficient agency of civilization and an important factor in public morals. In the stern West and the sensitive South its fruit (white and black respectively) though not eaten, is agreeable to the public taste and, though not exported, profitable to the general welfare. That the legitimate relation of the tree to justice was no discovery of Judge Lynch (who, indeed, conceded it no primacy over the lamp-post and the bridge-girder) is made plain by the following passage from Morryster, who antedated him by two centuries; While in yt londe I was carried to see ye Ghogo tree, whereof I had hearde moch talk but sayynge yt I saw naught remarkabyll in it, ye hed manne of ye villayge where it grewe made answer as followeth; Ye tree is not nowe in fruite, but in his seasonne you shall see dependynge fr. his braunches all soch as have affroynted ye King his Majesty. And I was furder tolde yt ye worde Ghogo sygnifyeth in yr tong ye same as rapscal in our owne. --Trauvells in ye Easte.Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds, --exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness. In the Roman Catholic Church feasts are movable and immovable, but the celebrants are uniformly immovable until they are full. In their earliest development these entertainments took the form of feasts for the dead such were held by the Greeks, under the name Nemeseia, by the Aztecs and Peruvians, as in modern times they are popular with the Chinese though it is believed that the ancient dead, like the modern, were light eaters. Among the many feasts of the Romans was the Novemdiale, which was held, according to Livy, whenever stones fell from heaven.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
CORPORAL, n. A man who occupies the lowest rung of the military ladder.Fiercely the battle raged and, sad to tell, Our corporal heroically fell Fame from her height looked down upon the brawl And said He hadn't very far to fall. --Giacomo Smith
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
FREEDOM, n. Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint's infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly. Liberty. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either. Freedom, as every schoolboy knows, Once shrieked as Kosciusko fell On every wind, indeed, that blows I hear her yell. She screams whenever monarchs meet, And parliaments as well, To bind the chains about her feet And toll her knell. And when the sovereign people cast The votes they cannot spell, Upon the pestilential blast Her clamors swell. For all to whom the power's given To sway or to compel, Among themselves apportion Heaven And give her Hell. --Blary O'Gary.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields 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.Said a man to a crapulent youth I thought You a total abstainer, my son.So I am, so I am, said the scrapgrace caught --But not, sir, a bigoted one. --G.J.
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
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