Related:

• ABDICATION, n. An act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high temperature of the throne.
  Poor Isabella's Dead, whose abdication Set all tongues wagging in the Spanish nation....
• PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own.
  Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a privation of which he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness by the coat-skirt of the male and the train of the female, and by a marked tendency to ornament that part of his attire where the tail should be, and indubitably once was....
• PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• SCRIBBLER, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• PHILISTINE, n. One whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment.
  He is sometimes learned, frequently prosperous, commonly clean and always solemn....
• EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order.
  The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other -- which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of a dog....
• ELECTOR, n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man's choice.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• IMMIGRANT, n. An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...