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

1. The muzzle of the will. 2. The Pecksniffian mask of the fundamental Bill Sykes. 3. The aspiration of Rosinante to be Pegasus.

      Church Unity: Joining my church.

      Cigarettist: One who is late every morning and fresh every evening.

      City: 1. Any place where men have builded a jail, a bagnio, a gallows, a morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon, and laid out a cemetery—hence a center of life. 2. A herding region; any part of the earth where ignorance and stupidity integrate, agglomerate and breed.

      Civilization: A device for increasing human ills; a machine for the perpetuation of the weak; an ingenious contraption for spreading disease and hunger. (See war, harlot, politician, liar, Teddy, Sulzer, Murphy, hypocrisy, newspaper, forger, jail, policemen, lawyer, walking delegate, capitalist, poverty, clergyman.) E. g., "Do you believe in civilization?" "Yep." From The Confessions of Herr Krupp.

      Commonsense: The ability to detect values—to know a big thing from a little one. (I'd rather possess Commonsense than to have six degrees from Oxford.—Fingy Conners' Confessions.)

      Clock: 1. A telltale; a gossip; a blab. 2. A chink through which the Greta Secret leaks. 3. The Big Ben of eternity.

      Coffin: 1. L'Envoi, the end of the legend. 2. An ornamental candy-box which no one cares to open. 3. A room without a door or a skylight.

      College: A place where you have to go in order to find out that there is nothing in it. (See Marriage.)

      College Degree: A social disgenic, as compared with proof of competence.

      Comic: Tragedy viewed from the wings.

      Competition: 1. The struggle for a cake of ice in hell. 2. The life of trade, and the death of the trader.

      Chimeric: To follow the right and get left. E. g., A. He was chimeric. B. All the same, he went to the Chair like a man.

      Concoction: 1. An imaginative mosaic distinguished from a lie in this, that a lie is "made up" and a concoction is "put together." 2. A social, religious, economic or political allegory, dogma, creed or program which lands some one in power and flattens out those who believe in it. 3. A mixture of dream and reality, sometimes called "Universe" or "World," put together by two strolling Super-Gentlemen Adventurers, sometimes known as God and Satan.

      Confidence: The one big lesson the world needs most to learn.

      Conservative: One who is opposed to the things he is in favor of.

      Compliment: A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth or not, as the case may be.

      Console: To stab one in pain with the bare bodkin of pity.

      Contradiction: 1. Two lies disputing the roadway. 2. A head-on collision in which two trains of thought telescope each other.

      Coquetry: 1. An eye-shade worn by lubricity. 2. The colored glasses of The-Thing-Itself. 3. The death-tumbrel that Passion builds for its dreams.

      Consciousness: A state wherein one becomes aware that he is being robbed, swindled or duped, by either a natural or an artificial law. Aside from his periods of sleep it may be said that man is always in a state of consciousness when voting, making love, or when succumbing to any other form of hypnotic suggestion.

      Conversion: 1. To be suddenly seized by fright before a fiction or a fact. 2. To execute a mental and moral pirouette from one absurdity to a worse one. 3. To exhaust one pleasure and seek redemption in another. 4. A backslider from your own ideas to those of an inferior.

      Co-operation: Doing what I tell you to do, and doing it quick.

      Courage: 1. A matter of the red corpuscle. 2. A matter of getting used to it. (It is oxygen that makes every attack, and without oxygen in his blood to back him, a man attacks nothing—not even a pie.—From Wilbur Nesbit's book Bunc as I Have Found It.)

      Creed: A metaphor with ankylosis—a figure of speech frozen stiff with fright.

      Curiosity: 1. A gulf that swallows gods, men, creeds, matter, worlds, philosophies. 2. A peephole in the brain through which one sees the pomp and ceremony of the Absurd. 3. A monstrous antenna that feels its way through matter and mind, and founders in the Infinite. 4. At its lowest, the instinct that boosts us up to peep over our neighbor's transom, symboled by a knot-hole.

      Critics: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any.

      Criminal: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do legally.

      Cromwell (Oliver): The father of Nell Gwynn.

      Credit: The lifeblood of commerce.