The Devil's Dictionary

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The Devil's Dictionary
The Cynic's Word Book
AuthorAmbrose Bierce
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreReference, satire
PublisherNeale Publishing Co.
Publication date
1911

The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce. Originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book, it features Bierce's witty and often ironic spin on many common English words. Retitled in 1911, it has been followed by numerous "unabridged" versions compiled after Bierce's death, which include definitions absent from earlier editions.

History

Origins and early development

The Devil's Dictionary began as a serialized column during Bierce's time as a columnist for the San Francisco News Letter, a small weekly financial magazine founded by Frederick Marriott in the late 1850s. Although a serious magazine aimed at businessmen, the News Letter contained a page of informal satirical content titled "The Town Crier". Bierce, hired as the "Crier"'s editor in December 1868, wrote satire with such irreverence and lack of inhibition he was nicknamed "the laughing devil of San Francisco".[citation needed]

Bierce resigned from "The Town Crier"[when?] and spent three years in London. Returning to San Francisco in 1875, he made two submissions to the News Letter in hopes of regaining his old position. Both were written under aliases. One, entitled "The Demon's Dictionary", contained Bierce's definitions for 48 words. Later forgotten in his compiling of The Devil's Dictionary, they were added almost a century later to an Enlarged Devil's Dictionary published in 1967.[citation needed]

Though Bierce's preface to The Devil's Dictionary dates the earliest work to 1881, its origins can be traced to August 1869. Short of material and recently possessed of a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, he suggested writing a "comic dictionary" for the "Town Crier". To a quote from Webster's entry for "Vicegerents", "Kings are sometimes called God's vicegerents", he added the italicized rejoinder, "It is to be wished they would always deserve the appellation," then suggested Webster might have used his talent to comic effect.

Comic definitions were not a regular feature of Bierce's next column ("Prattle", in the magazine The Argonaut, of which he became an editor in March 1877). Nevertheless, he included comic definitions in his columns dated November 17, 1877 and September 14, 1878.

It was in early 1881 that Bierce first used the title, The Devil's Dictionary, while editor-in-chief of another weekly San Francisco magazine, The Wasp. The "dictionary" proved popular, and during his time in this post (1881–86) Bierce included 88 installments, each comprising 15–20 new definitions.

In 1887, Bierce became an editor of The San Francisco Examiner and introduced "The Cynic's Dictionary". This was to be the last of his "dictionary" columns until 1904, and it continued irregularly until July 1906. A number of the definitions are accompanied by satiric verses, many of which are signed with comic pseudonyms such as "Salder Bupp", "Orm Pludge", and "Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.".

Republication

What had started as a newspaper serialization was first reproduced in book form in 1906, under the title The Cynic's Word Book. Published by Doubleday, Page and Company, this book contained definitions of 500 words in the first half of the alphabet (A–L). A further 500 words (M–Z) were published in 1911, in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, this time under the title The Devil's Dictionary. Bierce preferred the latter title, and he claimed the earlier, "more reverent" title had been forced upon him by the religious scruples of his previous employer.[citation needed]

In 1967, an expanded version, titled The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, was published following extensive research by Ernest J. Hopkins.[1] This version included the definitions which Bierce had left out when compiling his Collected Works, because he was compiling the book in Washington, D.C., while many of the entries were in San Francisco and unavailable following the earthquake of 1906. This updated, 1967 version adds 851 definitions to the 1,000 which had appeared in versions published during Bierce's lifetime; in particular, the 1967 version includes the words preceding "Abasement", which were originally defined in the Demon's Dictionary. The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary is in print in the Penguin Classics series.[2]

Various editions are currently in print, such as Hopkins' aforementioned The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, The Devil's Dictionary (1999) published by Oxford University Press,[3] and The Unbridged Devil's Dictionary (2000) compiled by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, which includes previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries, restores definitions dropped from previous editions, and removes almost 200 definitions wrongly attributed to Bierce.[4] The Devil's Dictionary is also available online through Project Gutenberg as well as through Wiktionary.

Examples

Conservative
(n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.[5]
Cynic
(n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.[6]
Egotist
(n.) A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Faith
(n.) Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Lawyer
(n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.[7]
Marriage
(n.) A household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Religion
(n.) A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Youth
(n.) The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice is never heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into Baltimost! —Polydore Smith[8]

Under the entry "leonine", meaning a single line of poetry with an internal rhyming scheme, Bierce included an apocryphal couplet written by the fictitious "Bella Peeler Silcox" (i.e. Ella Wheeler Wilcox) in which an internal rhyme is achieved in both lines only by mispronouncing the rhyming words:

The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores: "O tempora! O mores!"

Successors

The Devil's Dictionary has spawned many successors, including:

  • Esar, Evan (1943). Esar's Comic Dictionary. Harvest House.
  • Leonard Rossiter (1980). Devil's Bedside Book. Hamlyn. ISBN 0-600-20105-8.
  • Kelly-Bottle, Stan (1981). The Computer Contradictionary. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-034022-6.
  • Volkart, Edmond Howell (1986). The Angel's Dictionary: a Modern Tribute to Ambrose Bierce. F. Watts. ISBN 978-0-531150-01-6
  • Rollins, L.A. Rollins (1987). Lucifer's Lexicon
  • Bayan, Rick (1994). The Cynic's Dictionary. Hearst Books. ISBN 0-7858-1713-1.
  • Chambers (2008). Chamber's Gigglossary. ISBN 0-550-10414-3.
  • Mellie, Roger (2010). Roger's Profanisaurus. Dennis Publishing. ISBN 978-1-907232-90-9.
  • Abbott, Derek (2011). Wickedictionary. CreateSpace. ISBN 1-4636-6826-0.
  • Koenig, Rhoda (2012). The New Devil's Dictionary: A New Version of the Cynical Classic. Lyons Press. ISBN 978-0-762772-47-6.
  • CrimethInc. (2013). Contradictionary. CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective.
  • Napoli, James (2014). The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm. Fall River. ISBN 978-1-4351-5579-4
  • Schuberth, Richard (2014). Das neue Worterbuch des Teufels [The new Devil's Dictionary]: Ein aphoristisches Lexikon mit zwei Essays zu Ambrose Bierce und Karl Kraus sowie aphoristischen Reflexionen zum Aphorismus selbst. Klever Verlag. ISBN 978-3-902665-75-1

References

  1. ^ The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary: With 851 newly discovered words and definitions added to the previous thousand-word collection. London: Penguin Books. 1989. {{cite book}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)
  2. ^ The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary. Penguin Classics Series. ISBN 0-14-118592-9.
  3. ^ Bierce, Ambrose (1999). The Devil's Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512627-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  4. ^ The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (First ed.). Athens, GA: University of Georgia press. 2000. ISBN 0-8203-2196-6. {{cite book}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)
  5. ^ "Conservative" entry in The Devil's Dictionary at Dict.org
  6. ^ "Cynic" entry in The Devil's Dictionary at Virginia.edu
  7. ^ "Lawyer" entry in The Devil's Dictionary at Dict.org
  8. ^ "Youth" entry in The Devil's Dictionary at Dict.org

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Wikiquote has quotations related to The Devil's Dictionary.
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