Abstract | Something one understands perfectly, but cannot explain to anyone else. |
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Art | Art was thought to be in the eye of the beholder, until Dali showed us that art is the eye of the beholder, and there it was, until Andy Warhol showed us that art is really in a can of soup. |
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Beauty | Beauty is in the holder of the eye. |
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Common sense (The) Dead | How we commonly refer to our expectations of others. |
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Diplomacy | High-end hypocrisy. |
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Divorce | What husband and wife do together when they no longer wish to do anything together. |
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Freedom | Freedom is the privilege of exercising responsibility. |
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Funerals | The living attend funerals, not to mourn the dead, but to inspect their own emptiness. |
Getting Old | I am not getting old; I am just getting older. |
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Grace (God’s) | Unmerited favour given. |
Grace (man’s) | Arbitrary favour ascribed. |
Hip | 1) The structure of the human skeleton supporting the lower limbs, and the hind limbs or corresponding parts in beasts of the fields and streams. 2) Quality desired and or claimed by one who aspires or claims worldly sophistication (see sophistication). |
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How quaint | A saying used to ridicule something that others do despite the fact that it is old-fashioned. |
Humility | Humility fears not humiliation. |
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Ignorance | Ignorance does not breed wisdom. |
Invention Life
| Invention is the necessity of all mothers. Life is never fair, but tolerable when one forgets one's self. |
Likelihood (The) Living
| What is least likely is most likely when least likely. The living attend funerals, not to mourn the dead, but to inspect their own emptiness. |
New-fangled | Something one does not wish to do because one’s children do it. |
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Marriage | Made in heaven, institutionalised on earth, and buried under divorce. |
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Middle-age | What nobody knows what is. |
Money | People are the root of all money. |
Old | What those who are, do not want to be. |
Old age | Old age is not inevitable, but occurs when the passage of years is accompanied by the passing of dreams, passions, and commitments. |
Old-fashioned | Something one does not wish to do, because one’s parents do it. |
Outdated | A term we apply to something that we do not wish to do any more. |
The past | There's nothing quite as wasted as the want for something gone. |
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Patience | Patience is what most desire most, until the need for it arises. |
Politics | Politics is the institutionalised, legalised mechanism devised by would-be war lords and bandits who wish to avoid actual combat if at all possible. |
Power Prediction
| Power is the illusory and intangible quality that those with god-complexes ascribe to themselves. To understand prediction, it is helpful to break the word down into its independent components. “Pre” is a prefix (definition of “prefix” still in preliminary stages) meaning earlier, before, prior to. “Diction” is a noun meaning Choice and use of words in speech or writing. Therefore, prediction means a thing preceding the use of words, and the choice thereof—a lot like incoherent, guttural utterances.
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Probability | What is least likely is most likely when least likely. |
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Projection | If Shakespeare had lived in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, he would have had Gertrude, in Hamlet, saying “The lady doth project too much, methinks.” |
Respect | What we demand from everyone, and grudgingly give to only a few. |
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Running away | The down-and-out revivals of the plans for yesterday, are the walls that I bang into when I try to run away. Runnin' from nowhere just as fast as I can, and just as soon as I get there, I'm back where I am. |
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Sophistication | What one is who practices or presumes to practice sophistry or sophism, to wit: - Plausible but fallacious argumentation.
- A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument.
- Deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone
Quality possessed by a sophist: any of a group of Greek philosophers and teachers in the 5th century BC who speculated on a wide range of subjects; 2: someone whose reasoning is subtle and often specious. In other words, what we all either openly or secretly wish to possess. |
Thinking | Anyone who thinks he is because he thinks, has stopped thinking. |
Quaint | Something old-fashioned that one wishes to do anyway. |
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Weddings | The married attend weddings to gloat. |
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Words | What most people think they are using when they open their mouths and produce sounds. |
Words | People understand so little of what others say, because we use the bare minimum of words actually available, rarely use them properly, and almost always mispronounce them. Our human society is so bent, willy-nilly, upon racing through and shortcutting everything undertaken, including basic communication between individuals, to say nothing of groups, that established meanings, and even a common pronunciation, are disregarded almost purposefully, as if speaking jargon and unintelligible dialect somehow gives one identity and power. The process begins in grade school as secret little slang words and phrases, and then refined in adulthood as slurred, clipped, twisted vernacular, sometimes so severe that people from other regions have great difficulty in comprehending single syllables. We have Southern “hick,” “ebonics,” the Baahston tea cant, Western twang, New Yawkese, and more. One should learn and use as many words as is humanly possible, use them as they are defined in standardized unabridged dictionaries, and as properly pronounced as is mortally attainable. |
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Young | What those who are, do not want to be. |