The Roycroft Dictionary, Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days. Elbert Hubbard

      Admiration: 1. The smile of Spite. 2. To secretly wish evil to one who has given us pleasure. 3. A form of shamefaced flattery. 4. To murder and go scot-free. E. g., "I admire him very much." "Ah, so that is the reason he has become thoughtful!" From Bean's Meditations of a Vegetarian.

      Afterward: A space of time in which something happens after something else has happened, as, life, death; love, disillusion; riches, gout; wine, headache; unselfishness, regret.

      Assembly: The Pantheon of the mediocre.

      Autobiography: 1. Auto-intoxication. 2. Things which no one else will say about you, and which therefore you have to say of yourself.

      Apostle: 1. A machine for recording a lie. 2. A person who has grown round-shouldered from following the spoor of another. 3. A lickspittle needed by philosophers in their business.

      Albany: 1. A place beyond which Henry Hudson could not go. 2. The lobby of the White House. 3. Famous in history by the biennial meetings of the Blackmailers' Club. 4. Any place wherein a capitol is burned at a pre-established psychological moment. (There is a famous proverb which says, "Those who are in Albany escaped Sing Sing, and those who are in Sing Sing were on their way to Albany.")

      Athens: See Pericles and Aspasia.

      Art: 1. The vengeance of the Ideal on the Real. 2. Anything done by a man or a woman on paper, canvas, marble or a musical keyboard that people pretend to understand, and sometimes buy. 3. The antithesis of whatever becomes popular in the cultured world. 4. To cast out the dragons of virtue and hypocrisy by committing some imaginary sin and telling the world about it. 5. The beautiful way of doing things. 6. The expression of a man's joy in his work. 7. A matter of hair-cut and neckties. 8. The uplifting of the beautiful so that all may see and enjoy. 9. The utilization of love's exhaust. 10. Love's by-product.

      Art-Collector: A man who operates a morgue for things rich, rare and precious.

      Atheist: Any man who does not believe in himself.

      Athlete Mex: Any man who throws the bull.

      Atonement: 1. Embolism of the will. 2. To raise a sin from a vice to a virtue. 3. A borax that kills the vermin of remorse, but that can not be relied upon to kibosh their breeding-place. 4. An immunity-bath in preparation for transgressions to come. (Among certain religious sects, the Day of Atonement is the day on which all gonofs line up for a fresh start.)

      Attention: Concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put something in the pocket; hence, in law and politics, the frame-up.

       ACK: 1. That part of the body to which your friend directs his remarks when he tells you the truth. 2. A smooth surface composed of skin and bones which stretches between Land's End and John O'Groat's.

      Bal-Masque: The coronation of Mephisto.

      Balivorax: A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes, fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it, babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love it who have babies who cry for it. This is the filler fidgeted for by Juno before she weaned Hercules—who was no bottle-baby—and fed to him afterward. Ask your Bagpiper and take no other.

      Beatitude: A rare and evanescent mental state caused by the reception of money that one has not earned. Synonyms: Windfall, remittance.

      Beggar: A robber who has lost his nerve—a bandit with a streak of yellow in his ego.

      Biddle: The act of introducing a prizefight in a Sunday School.

      Billysunday: 1. A theological jumping-jack, jerked by financial strings. 2. Any one with a pious emotional jag. 3. Hypnosis at so much per. 4. A person intent on saving his soul by religious rigmarole at the expense of reason. 5. To paddle away to Paradise in an orthodox canoe, and feel happy in the thought that most of the folks on the Big Ship are going to Hell.

      Bloomingdale: A condition of mind.

      Bastard: Any man who doubts his own immaculate conception.

      Bean: A dynamic spheroid, combustible under certain conditions.

      Blaberino: Any person who tells a person something a person says about him, which puts fishbones in the throat and brickbats in the Ostermoor of the person told.

      Booty: 1. Whatever belongs to somebody that really belongs to somebody else, or whatever belongs to somebody else that really belongs to you or ought to belong to you if it did not belong to a third party—hence, anything at all. 2. Property in a transitional stage.

      Baptism: Hydrocephalic abracadabra.

      Bard: Anciently a poet; now a Poet-Laureate.