The Devil's Dictionary

wrought upon still another, the which it is as manifestly my duty

to estop as to forestall mine own tort. Wherefore if I would be

righteous I am bound to restrain my neighbor, by force if needful,

in all those injurious enterprises from which, through a better

disposition and by the help of Heaven, I do myself restrain.”

RIME, n. Agreeing sounds in the terminals of verse, mostly bad. The verses themselves, as distinguished from prose, mostly dull. Usually (and wickedly) spelled “rhyme.”

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

The rimer quenches his unheeded fires,

The sound surceases and the sense expires.

Then the domestic dog, to east and west,

Expounds the passions burning in his breast.

The rising moon o’er that enchanted land

Pauses to hear and yearns to understand.

Mowbray Myles

RIOT, n. A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.

R.I.P. A careless abbreviation of requiescat in pace, attesting to indolent goodwill to the dead. According to the learned Dr. Drigge, however, the letters originally meant nothing more than reductus in pulvis

.

RITE, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.

RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.

ROAD, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

All roads, howsoe’er they diverge, lead to Rome,

Whence, thank the good Lord, at least one leads back home.

Borey the Bald

ROBBER, n. A candid man of affairs.

It is related of Voltaire that one night he and some traveling companion lodged at a wayside inn. The surroundings were suggestive, and after supper they agreed to tell robber stories in turn. “Once there was a Farmer-General of the Revenues.” Saying nothing more, he was encouraged to continue. “That,” he said, “is the story.”

ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer’s thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination — free, lawless, immune to bit and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as Carlyle might say — a mere reporter. He may invent his characters and plot, but he must not imagine anything taking place that might not occur, albeit his entire narrative is candidly a lie. Why he imposes this hard condition on himself, and “drags at each remove a lengthening chain” of his own forging he can explain in ten thick volumes without illuminating by so much as a candle’s ray the black profound of his own ignorance of the matter. There are great novels, for great writers have “laid waste their powers” to write them, but it remains true that far and away the most fascinating fiction that we have is “The Thousand and One Nights.”

ROPE, n. An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one’s whole life long. It has been largely superseded by a more complex electrical device worn upon another part of the person; and this is rapidly giving place to an apparatus known as the preachment.

ROSTRUM, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.

ROUNDHEAD, n. A member of the Parliamentarian party in the English civil war — so called from his habit of wearing his hair short, whereas his enemy, the Cavalier, wore his long. There were other points of difference between them, but the fashion in hair was the fundamental cause of quarrel. The Cavaliers were royalists because the king, an indolent fellow, found it more convenient to let his hair grow than to wash his neck. This the Roundheads, who were mostly barbers and soap-boilers, deemed an injury to trade, and the royal neck was therefore the object of their particular indignation. Descendants of the belligerents now wear their hair all alike, but the fires of animosity enkindled in that ancient strife smoulder to this day beneath the snows of British civility.

RUBBISH, n. Worthless matter, such as the religions, philosophies, literatures, arts and sciences of the tribes infesting the regions lying due south from Boreaplas.

RUIN, v. To destroy. Specifically, to destroy a maid’s belief in the virtue of maids.

RUM, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

RUMOR, n. A favorite weapon of the assassins of character.

Sharp, irresistible by mail or shield,

By guard unparried as by flight unstayed,

O serviceable Rumor, let me wield

Against my enemy no other blade.

His be the terror of a foe unseen,

His the inutile hand upon the hilt,

And mine the deadly tongue, long, slender, keen,

Hinting a rumor of some ancient guilt.

So shall I slay the wretch without a blow,

Spare me to celebrate his overthrow,