Related:

• REPARATION, n. Satisfaction that is made for a wrong and deducted from the satisfaction felt in committing it.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• COURT FOOL, n. The plaintiff. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary
• BAPTISM, n. A sacred rite of such efficacy that he who finds himself in heaven without having undergone it will be unhappy forever.
  It is performed with water in two ways -- by immersion, or plunging, and by aspersion, or sprinkling....
• VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• HANGMAN, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace having a criminal ancestry.
  In some of the American States his functions are now performed by an electrician, as in New Jersey, where executions by electricity have recently been ordered -- the first instance known to this lexicographer of anybody questioning the expediency of hanging Jerseymen....
• 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....
• RANK, n. Relative elevation in the scale of human worth.
  He held at court a rank so high That other noblemen asked why....
• COMPROMISE, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have
  and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due....
• 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....