Related:

• YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.
  But yesterday I should have thought me blest To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak Of middle life and look adown the bleak And unfamiliar foreslope to the West, Where solemn shadows all the land invest And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest....
• 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....
• Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer from the greed of his customer.
  -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary...
• GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student.
  Beside a lonely grave I stood -- With brambles 'twas encumbered...
• LOSS, n. Privation of that which we had, or had not.
  Thus, in the latter sense, it is said of a defeated candidate that he "lost his electio...
• HERS, pron. His. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary
• LYRE, n. An ancient instrument of torture. The word is now used in a figurative sense to denote the poetic faculty, as in the following fiery lines of our great poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  I sit astride Parnassus with my lyre, And pick with care the disobedient wire....
• LITIGANT, n. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack and an impediment in his hope.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...