Related:

• PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him.
  For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk....
• CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.
  An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine was pouted on his lips to revive him....
• EMANCIPATION, n. A bondman's change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.
  He was a slave: at word he went and came; His iron collar cut him to the bone....
• WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government.
  In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to....
• SCARABEE, n. The same as scarabaeus. He fell by his own hand Beneath the great oak tree.
  He'd traveled in a foreign land. He tried to make her understand The dance that's called the Saraband, But he called it Scarabee....
• COENOBITE, n. A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin of wickedne
  and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of awful examples....
• HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.
  Lo! the poor humorist, whose tortured mind See jokes in crowds, though still to gloom inclined -- Whose simple appetite, untaught to stray, His brains, renewed by night, consumes by day....
• ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty.
  This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting....
• Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off.
  -- Old Testament -- 1 Kings xx, 11...