What’s Voltaire got to do with it?

Here is my thirdupdate of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.

G

God: a) a fellow who could solve all our problems but does not; b) a joker who owns the deck

gold: “ a yellow metal that makes white men crazy” — Tatanka Lyotake (Sitting Bull)

**goldfish food — a method of feeding, similar to U.S. elections; (vide supra, election)

Google: a private, but publicly traded company with the ability to intercept and store virtually every electronic communication in the world — which it uses however it likes

grass: a thirsty vegetable tyrant with tough roots that rules the United States suburbs

Great Dane: an animal of such beauty, strength, loyalty and nobility that God punished it with a short life span

H

hell: a) a fantasy; b) a Christian Freudian slip; c) a place where you’ll probably not have a nice cookout with your friends when you are all dead

Hemingway, Ernest: a writer whose critical reputation is lower than it’s ever been, because everyone tries to write like him now, and can’t, so they pretend they don’t really want to

Hinduism: a religion whose goal, unlike all other religions, is not eternal life, but eternal extinction; this is its only rational element

homosexual: a man whom some people believe likes men too much, which disturbs some of those people, for reasons obscure or obvious

horse: a gentle and beautiful animal that man turned into an instrument of war

human: a fifth-rate god, selling cheap tracts, giving them away, but not circling back to pick up the discards from the cluttered streets and gutters

humor: a) a technique of survival; b) the ability to breathe underwater; c) the only humane method by which sentient humans can survive on Earth; d) people with no sense of humor can survive, though there is no apparent reason for them to do it

I

**ideology: a lie bullies tell to cowards (vide supra, fascism)

Illinois:  the most corrupt state in the union, with the possible exception of New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Kansas, and some others

Islam: a religion as ridiculous as any other, which demonstrates its ignorance by its opinion of dogs

J

jazz: “Jazz is freedom. Think about that. You think about that.” — Thelonious Monk

Jews: a) (pre-1948, C.E.) a people universally oppressed, exiled and murdered, whose response was to develop a sense of humor; b) (post-1948, C.E.) a people universally oppressed, exiled and murdered, whose response was to show Palestinians how the shoe feels on the other foot; c) (post 2023, C.E.) self-righteous mass murderers

K

king: a) a relic; b) a lucky guy with a big chair

Kool-Aid: a cheap American pleasure, sometimes fatal; hence, “Drink the Kool-Aid”

Ku Klux Klan: a) white evangelical Christian cowards who kill helpless brown, black and Jewish people, to show that Ku Klux Weenies might allow them furriners to continue to plow, plant, weed, tend, reap and sow their land and send it over to Massa, minus the sharecropper’s part; but b) have to call a Black girl back from Tallapoosa State to figger out the finance numbers, in a separate part of the manse; while c) white men with no more brains than the Massa stash their big scary hoods under the silage lest some damn congressers come around again

L

lawnmower: a form of legal identification

lemmings: a) Americans who do not vote; b) Americans who vote

liberal: an invidious term people use today to show contempt for the principles upon which their country was founded

Libertarian: a political party whose platform is to follow ideas off a cliff

M

Man: an inferior woman, who knows it and resents it

marijuana: a useful drug, illegal because pleasurable

mathematics: a science that allows man to count his murders

memory: a mental function that becomes increasingly called upon, and increasingly useless, as one ages

Mexico: a) a country disliked by many North Americans, because the days are longer there, and the people are nicer; b) the average Mexican day is two or three times longer than a day in the United States; c) trust me on this

mistaken: part of a multitude

Mohs scale: a comparative scale of the hardness of minerals, from softest (1) to hardest (10), best remembered by the mnemonic: Toronto Girls Can Flirt, And Only Quit To Chase Dwarves; b) the capital letters represent talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite, apatite, orthoclase (feldspar), quartz, topaz, corundum (ruby), and diamond

money: a) petrified labor; b) one’s own, but usually someone else’s

mouth: the body part through which most mistakes are made

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: a) the most talented human being who ever lived; b) a man who died at 34

**music: a) appreciation of God; b) a quest for God; c) defiance, in the absence of God (vide supra : Beethoven)