PERFUME: Any smell that is used to down a worse one.
PHILOSOPHY: Our highest conception of life, its duties and its destinies.
POLITICIANS: 1. Men who volunteer the task of governing us for a consideration. 2. See Graftheimer.
PERICLES: See Aspasia.
PESSIMIST: 1. One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.
2. The official vinegar-taster to Setebos.
PIETY: 1. The tinfoil of pretense. 2. That feeling of reverence we have toward the Almighty on account of His supposed resemblance to ourselves.
PUBLISHER: 1. An emunctory business, first functioned by Barabbas. 2.
One of a band of panders which sprang into existence soon after the death of Gutenberg and which now overruns the world. 3. The patron saint of the mediocre.
POET: 1. A person born with the instinct to poverty. 2. One whose ideas of the beautiful and the sublime get him in jail or Potter"s Field. 3.
The patron saint of landlords. 4. A worthless, shiftless chap whose songs adorn the libraries of fat shopkeepers and paunchy Philistines one hundred years after the chap has died of malnutrition. 5. A dope-fiend.
POETRY: 1. A subst.i.tute for the impossible. 2. The bill and coo of s.e.x.
PLATONIC LOVE: The only kind that is blind. It never knows where it is going to fetch up.
PLANET: A planet is a large body of matter entirely surrounded by a void, as distinguished from a clergyman, who is a large void entirely surrounded by matter.
PLAY: A wise method of Nature which prevents one"s nerves from setting on the outside of his Stein-Bloch.
POCKET: The seat of the human soul.
POLICE: Similia similibus.
POLICY: Leaving a few things unsaid.
POLITENESS: 1. The screen of language; the irony of civility; a fishing-rod. 2. A subst.i.tute for war. 3. To wipe your feet carefully on the common doormat before letting yourself in another"s premises with a skeleton key. 4. Caliban in a boiled shirt, tuxedo and spats.
(Politeness in the animal world is known after eating only; in the human world it is known both before and after eating, and, in a certain restricted circle, during eating.)
PRAYER: A supplication intended for the person who prays. Only very dull people doubt its efficacy.
PRIG: A person with more money than he needs.
PREACHER: 1. Mendicancy in a celluloid collar. 2. A man who advises others concerning things about which he knows nothing. 3. Any man who lives on six hundred dollars a year and only works orally. 4. (Now obsolete) One who makes pastoral calls, frightens the young, astonishes the old, bothers the busy, and serves disappointed females as vicarious lover, father, friend, and personal representative of Deity.
PRACTICAL POLITICS: The glad hand, and a swift kick in the pants.
PRINCIPLE: 1. Bait. 2. A formula for doing a thing that, unformulated, would land the doer in jail. (Must not be confused with the word _princ.i.p.al_. Both words are used correctly in the following sentence: One may live one"s life without principle, but not without princ.i.p.al.
Or, again, Principle is sometimes princ.i.p.al; but princ.i.p.al has no principle. Or, The princ.i.p.al was never paid on principle.)
PROSECUTOR: 1. One who abets a crime after it has or has not been committed. 2. An oratorical censor that precedes the coming of the hangman. 3. A pumice-stone that gives to the Statue of Justice a cleanly, Christian look. 4. A nose that can sniff the gallows, long before the wood is cut for it in the forest.
POSTPONEMENT: The father of failure.
PRISON: 1. A place where any lady may have a baby without fearing society. 2. An inst.i.tution where even crooks go wrong. 3. The House of a Thousand Tears. 4. The last resort of the obscure to achieve fame. 5. A banker"s mess-hall. 6. A place where men go to take the vow of chast.i.ty, poverty and obedience. 7. An example of a Socialist"s Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and compet.i.tion is eliminated.
PROTESTANTISM: 1. A splinter from the cross of Christ. 2. Acrobatic theologic mugwumpery. 3. Any one of fifty-seven varieties of hate. 4.
Sects which have taken the petticoats off of the saints and put them on their pastors.
PROGRESS: Getting free from theology, and subst.i.tuting psychology instead.
PROGRESSIVE: 1. A politician who wears his opinions pompadour. 2. An obstructionist who grows fat on conservatism and conversation. 3. A reactionary to whom movement and motion are necessary in order to keep warm, and secure gulps and guzzles. 4. A hungry or unsuccessful person; hence, an explosive, quixotic fellow with empty pockets and a shallow pate. 5. One who has felt the slings and arrows of outrageous success that has come to others. 6. A political piker, who will not play the game according to the rules which he himself devised. 7. One who would recall all decisions that do not uphold his claims. 8. A man who steals a label, and clapping it on himself, thinks that he is It. 9. A plan for going forward by backing up to mob rule. (The first Progressive of whom we know was Judas. The next was Ananias. Lazarus was a Progressive, and had he married the Queen of Sheba he would have changed places with Dives. _E. g._, "This age belongs to the Progressives."--From Kazook"s _Confessions of a Popular Lick-Spittle_.)
PURGATORY: Two telephone systems in one town.
PROSPERITY: 1. That peculiar condition which excites the lively interest of the ambulance-chaser. 2. That which comes about when men believe in other men. 3. That condition which attracts the lively interest of lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages or indicted, or both.
POLYGAMY: An endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it.
PSYCHOLOGY: The science of human minds and their relationship one to another.
PUBLIC OPINION: The judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of the discerning few.
PUNISHMENT: 1. The justice that the guilty deal out to those who are caught. 2. A perpetual fine, imposed hourly during the lifetime of a human being for his temerity in living, and continued in Heaven or h.e.l.l for his temerity in dying. 3. Among the poor and lowly, a service due the State for disobeying the mandates of the rich and powerful; among the rich, a slight reaction from overeating. (There are three kinds of punishment: the punishment of G.o.d, the punishment of man, and the punishment of living in Buffalo.)
POPULARITY: The triumph of the commonplace.
PROPHETS: The advance couriers of Time.
PURITY: 1. A rapt, interested and ecstatic aloofness toward natural processes. 2. A sewerage system that carries off everything, leaving the soul perfectly bald. 3. A condition of the mind that causes one to snoop around in garbage-dumps and start a league. 4. A plan of teaching things to children in which they are not interested. 5. An ethereal nose giving the miraculous power of sensing the lavatory in the Elysian Fields before it smells the flowers. (There is purity of mind, purity of body and purity of speech. Any one person endowed with all three of these modes or purity is blessed, elect, saved, or otherwise atrophied and pickled.)
PHARISEE: A man with more religion than he knows what to do with.
PHILISTINE: A term of reproach used by prigs to designate certain people they do not like.
PHILOSOPHER: One who thinks in order to believe; one who formulates his prejudices and systematizes his ignorance.
ROYCROFT: 1. _Roy_ means "king"; and _croft_ means "home or craft."
Thus, Roycroft means King-Craft; working for the highest; doing your work just as good as you can--making things for the King. 2. The dignity and the divinity of labor--peace, reciprocity, health, industry, persistency and endurance.
RELAXATION: The first requirement of strength.
RECIPROCITY: 1. The act of seconding the emotion. 2. A widow teaching a clergyman how to tango, in return for his kindness in having shown her how to swim.
RACE PROBLEM: Picking the winner.
RECIPE: 1. Work, smile, study, play, love--Mix. 2. Concentrate, Consecrate, Work.
REDEEMER: 1. A man who died that grafters might live. 2. An Oriental who would have forgiven Hiram Johnson. 3. The founder of a great trust, with headquarters in the Vatican. 4. Any one who consorts with the underworld, but who spends his vacation after death in the upper world.
5. In the Catholic Church the Man Higher Up, to whom the Pope plays Jack Rose. 6. One who saved the whole world, but who had himself d.a.m.ned for his pains. _E. g._, First Citizen: "Christ was a myth." Second Citizen: "He was not!" (Then they murder each other in His Name.)
REASON: The arithmetic of the emotions.