Ability: the natural equipment to accomplish some small part of the meaner ambitions distinguishing able men from dead ones.
Absence: that which makes the heart grow fonder - of somebody else.
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Abyss: the distance between truth and sanity.
Academe: an ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy: a modern school where football is taught.
Accountability: the mother of caution.
Affectation: a woman's whole life.
Alliance: in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Alone: in bad company.
Altruism: (1) mowing your neighbour's lawn. (2) the art of doing unselfish things for selfish reasons.
Ambition: (1) the last refuge of the failure. (2) the grand enemy of all peace. (3) an overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Amusement: the happiness of those that cannot think.
Appeal: in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
Art: (1) lying, and the telling of beautiful untrue things. (2) artlessness. (3) prostitution.
Art, abstract: a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Articulate: unaware of the foolishness of what one is saying.
Atheist: (1) one who has no invisible means of support. (2) beloved of God. / (3) one who knows he was not merely created.
Author: one who has his head in the clouds and his feet behind the sales counter.
Belladonna: in Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Best-seller: the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
Birth: the first and direst of all disasters.
Bohemian: (1) a person who works to live but does not live to work. (2) a person open to the suspicion of irregular and immoral living. (3) a person conventionally unconventional.
Brain: (1) an apparatus with which we think that we think. (2) an appendage of the genital glands.
Charity: that which deals with symptoms instead of causes.
Charm: (1) a delusion of fleeting beauty. (2) the power to make someone else feel that both of you are wonderful.
Cheat: the girl who loves you back.
Circus: a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.
Child prodigy: a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
Children: a great comfort in your old age - and they help you reach it faster, too.
Chivalry: (1) the deportment of a man toward any woman not his wife. (2) a man's inclination to defend a woman against every man but himself.
Commerce: the school of cheating.
Common-sense: the reason so many people can be wrong at the same time.
Communism: the opiate of the intellectuals.
Congratulations: the civility of envy.
Conscience: (1) an inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. (2) the voice of men in man.
Consolation: the knowledge that a better man is more unfortunate than yourself.
Conspiracy: as in agreeing with everyone else to never speak the truth, and to plead ignorance that one is doing such.
Contentment: (1) moral laziness, the epitome of depravity. (2) the smother of invention. (3) being satisfied with what you haven't got. (4) the best powder for women's faces.
Controversy: a battle in which spittle or ink replaces the injurious cannonball and the inconsiderate bayonet.
Conversation: a vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath is called the listener.
Coronation: the ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.
Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Corruption: everything we see before us today.
Courage: (1) doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're afraid. (2) the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death. (3) a quality no one admits he lacks totally. (4) salvation. (5) the only virtue. /
Courtesy: (1) fictitious benevolence. (2) a gift notable in well-bred people and courtesans.
Cowardice: (1) the surest protection against temptation. (2) to sin by silence.
Criminal: someone who gets caught.
Cult: a religion with no political power.
Culture: (1) reading. (2) anything that people do and monkeys don't.
Cynic: (1) a man who tells you the truth about your own motives. (2) a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be. (3) a person who knows everything and believes nothing. (4) one who looks down on those below him. / (5) one who went without when God was handing out congeniality to lies. /
Cynicism: (1) a euphemism for realism. (2) intellectual dandyism.
Daring: one of the most conspicuous qualities of a man in security.
Dawn: the time when men of reason go to bed.
Dead: the majority.
Death: (1) the bursting of a cell. (2) to stop sinning suddenly.
Debate: the death of discussion.
Destiny: (1) a tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure. (2) to leave the known for the unknown.
Diplomacy: (1) the art of letting someone have your way. (2) the patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Dissenter: the dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Dullard: a member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of two hundred millions, including the statisticians.
Duty: that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible: good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Editor: one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.
Education: (1) capacity for further education. (2) all the minds of the past. (3) that which shows a person how little other people know. (4) the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. (5) persuasion. (6) that which has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. (7) a process which makes one rogue cleverer than another. (8) to reverence superiority and accept a fact though it slay him is the final test of an educated man. (9) something that puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes.
Enemy: those who have more accurate insights about you than you do yourself.
Enemy, the: made up of human beings just like us - that's why they can't be trusted.
Equality: (1) a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane person has ever given his assent. (2) the offspring of envy and covetousness. (3) womens' right to do absolutely whatever they want to do. /
Erudition: dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Exception: a thing which takes the liberty to differ from other things of its class, as an honest man, a truthful woman, etc.
Expert: (1) one who has focused all his ignorance on to one subject. (2) one who avoids the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. (3) a person who can take something you already know and make it sound confusing.
Eye: the traitor of the heart.
Face: a book where men may read strange things.
Fact: something that ceases to exist when ignored.
Failure: the fear of failure.
Fame: (1) an inscription on a grave. (2) chiefly a matter of dying at the right time.
Familiarity: a relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.
Fear: the start of wisdom.
Fiction: the good end happily, the bad unhappily - that is what fiction means.
Fidelity: A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Fool: (1) one who is without anxiety. (2) one who lacks the wish to personally know everything about life, death, and the purpose of all existence./ (3) a person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent.
Foreign Aid: taxing poor people in rich countries for the benefit of rich people in poor countries.
Forgetting: woman's first and greatest art.
Free speech: (1) no such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists. (2) something that is allowed because nobody listens.
Friendless: having no favors to bestow. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.
Friendship: (1) loneliness relieved of the anguish of loneliness. (2) a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.
Future: that period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Gaiety: the reckless ripple over depths of despair.
Gambling: poverty of mind.
Garden: a thing of beauty and a job forever.
Genealogy: an account of one's decent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Gratitude: lively expectation of benefits to come.
Grave: the place where beauty fades.
Great men: (1) meteors that burn so that the earth may be lighted. (2) only an actor playing out his own ideal. (3) almost always bad men. (4) insist on publishing their letters before they die. /
Greatness: saying what is true.
Greece: from heroes to shopkeepers.
Grief: the pleasure that lasts the longest.
Happiness: (1) a good stomach and an evil heart. (2) tranquillity and occupation. (3) ignorance. (4) to be very busy with the unimportant.
Hermit: a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.
Hero: one who is afraid to run away.
Hers: His
Hope: (1) the great falsifier of truth. (2) a mask the dying person wears. (3) the dream of those who are awake. (4) the fawning traitor of the mind.
Hospitality: the virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.
Husband: (1) one who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate. (2) a sweetheart who pushed his luck too far.
I: the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection. Its plural is said to be "We", but how there can be more than one myself is doubtless clearer to the grammarians than it is to the author of this incomparable dictionary.
Idealist: one who will make any sacrifice as long as it won't hurt business.
Idiot: a member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
Idleness: the ultimate purpose of the busy.
Ignoramus: someone who doesn't know something that you learned yesterday.
Ignorant: (1) happy and beautiful. / (2) wicked and ugly. /
Ignorance: (1) stupidity reduced to science. (2) a soft . . . easy . . . pillow. (3) the solidified wisdom of ages. (4) not innocence, but sin.
Immodest: having a strong sense of one's own merit, coupled with a feeble conception of worth in others.
Indiscretion: the guilt of woman.
Individuals: what people are because everyone else is. /
Infatuation: love that is not returned. /
Ink: A villainous compound chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.
Insanity: a rational adjustment to an insane world.
Intimacy: a relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.
Intuition: reason in a hurry.
Inventor: a person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
Jury: a group of twelve people of average ignorance chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Justice: a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
Juvenile delinquent: a child who starts acting like his parents.
Knowledge: when you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it.
Lawful: compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.
Lawyer: one skilled in circumvention of the law.
Laziness: (1) the mental alertness to avoid hard work. (2) unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree. (3) there is no such thing. Everyone works hard at whatever they want to do.
Learning: the kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Lecture: a means of transferring information from notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.
Lecturer: one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
Living: (1) the art of knowing how to believe lies. (2) the process of reacting to stress.
Longevity: uncommon extension of the fear of death.
Mammon: the god of the world's leading religion. His chief temple is the holy city of New York.
Manners: a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance.
Martyr: one who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.
Masses: (1) individuals minus quality. (2) the great identifiable majority, characterized by a feeling of general satisfaction, and spouting the first thing that comes into its head.
Matrimony: friendship under difficult circumstances.
Mine: belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.
Mini Skirt: the distillation of 5000 years of female wisdom. /
Minority: they that have achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.
Money: (1) a kind of disease which those who have it don't like to spread. (2) the measure of our distrust.
Murder: to obscure the truth.
Natural: a very difficult pose to maintain.
Necessary evil: an evil we like so much that we don't want it abolished.
Newspapers: (1) a daily spiritual death. (2) a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
Nihilist: someone who does not believe in anything. That is, a purely literary product.
Noble: has come to mean being strong enough to stand-up against reality. /
Nonsense: the objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.
Nostalgia: a longing for a place you wouldn't move back to.
Opiate: an unlocked door in the prison of Identity, leading into the jail yard.
Opportunity: a favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.
Optimism: (1) fatty degeneration of intelligence. (2) the instinct to lie. (3) an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment
but death.
Optimist: (1) one who believes (a) that good arises out of evil, and (b) that there is no evil. / (2) a proponent of the doctrine that black is white. (3) a bridegroom who thinks he has no bad habits.
Originality: (1) truthfulness. / (2) undetected plagiarism. (3) the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Orthodoxy: agnosticism towards deeper meaning.
Overeat: to dine.
Pantheism: the doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.
Paradox: when premature insight clashes with prevailing nonsense.
Past: the best prophet of the future.
Pastime: a device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for intellectual debility.
Patience: a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Pen: a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.
Personality: what you are when people are around; character is what you are when everybody goes home.
Pessimism: wisdom relative to optimism but cowardice relative to wisdom.
Pessimist: (1) one who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist. (2) a man who tells the truth prematurely.
Philanthropist: a thief who enjoys tossing a penny or two to beggars.
Philistine: 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.
Philosopher: he who can analyze his delusions.
Philosophy: (1) much words. / (2) homesickness - the longing to be at home everywhere.
Piety: reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.
Plagiarism: (1) stealing from thieves. (2) taking something from one man and making it worse. (3) the privilege of the appreciative man.
Plunder: to take the property of another without observing the decent and customary reticences of theft. To wrest the wealth of A from B and leave C lamenting a vanished opportunity.
Politeness: the most acceptable hypocrisy.
Poor: the only class of people who have time to cultivate the intellect.
Popularity: (1) to mingle with the erring throng. (2) what one buys at the cost of self respect.
Possessions: we only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes us.
Poverty: a great wealth, provided one is also short of a wife and family.
Pray: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Prayer: the most odious of concealed narcissisms.
Preacher: a man who advises others concerning things about which he knows nothing.
Press, the: a method of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Principles: another thing no woman can understand.
Professors: those who go to college and never get out.
Psychiatrist: one who lets you see why you are unhappy.
Psychoanalysis: the disease it claims to cure.
Psychology: (1) the science that tells you what you already know in words you don't understand.
Question: something that fools raise which wise men answered a thousand years ago.
Reality: what truths should take account of.
Recognition: what one desires from people who are more concerned with what they are doing than with what you have done.
Resident: unable to leave.
Responsibility: (1) the way of doing the right thing - and of shortening life. (2) a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor.
Revenge: biting a dog because the dog bit you.
Revolution: a successful effort to get rid of a bad government and set up a worse.
Romance: a self-induced state of hallucination that leaves one finally unromantic.
Savage: (1) the most conservative of human beings. (2) those who are content to be what they are.
Self-esteem: an erroneous appraisement.
Selfishness: (1) devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others. (2) seeking your own good at the world's cost.
Semantics: the art of telling someone they agree with you when they don't.
Sex: the castration of man.
Shyness: egotism out of its depth.
Sin: ignorance.
Sociologist: a scientist who blames crime on everything and everyone, except the person who commits it.
Sorrow: the future tense of love.
Spiritual: (1) anything enjoyable that is not easily or comfortably explained. (2) golf.
Statistics: figures used as arguments
Style: (1) the man himself. (2) a noble manner in an easy manner. (3) the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face. (4) the best style is truth. (5) knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
Success: (1) consuming more irreplaceable resources than others. / (2) having something to offer that morons regard as valuable. / (3) earning more money than your wife can spend, or, for women, finding such a man. (4) go with the crowd.
Suicide: what every gentleman promises to do if he breaks his vow to his beloved.
Superior man: an uneasy obligation.
Superstition: (1) a premature explanation that overstays its time. (2) the belief that all stage kisses give no satisfaction to the actor or actresses.
Suspicion: a coward's virtue.
Tabloids: fast reading for the slow thinking.
Tact: (1) tongue in check. (2) the ability to describe others as they see themselves. (3) the art of not saying what everyone else is thinking. (4) to lie about others as you would have them lie about you.
Take: to acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.
Teacher: (1) the vanity of teaching often tempts a man to forget he is a blockhead. (2) one who in his youth, admired teachers. (3) one whose mission it should be not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right. (4) one who frees his students from extreme modernity.
Telephone: an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Telescope: a device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.
Theology: (1) obsolete psychology. (2) the intent of which is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner. (3) an effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing . . . it is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
Thoughts: what you are today, what you will be tomorrow.
Time: (1) the press-agent of genius. (2) the most valuable thing a person can spend.
Today: yesterday's effect and tomorrow's cause.
Tolerance: indifference.
Tradition: (1) the democracy of the dead. (2) that part of history which has proven to be of
value for the present age.
Tragedy: (1) that there should one man die ignorant who had the capacity for knowledge. (2) the utter impossibility of changing what you have done.
Translation: (1) commentary that is sometimes better than the source. / (2) the safest translation is word-for-word.
Travel: (1) too often, instead of broadening the mind it only lengthens the conversation. (2) a fools paradise. A childish delight in being somewhere else.
Trial: a formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.
Trouble: mistaking love for beauty, success for brains, and television for civilization. /
True love: an old-fashioned sentiment.
Truth: (1) the object of philosophy, but not of philosophers. (2) stranger than fiction but not as popular. (3) what keeps honest men poor. (4) what is true is possible. (5) a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither. (6) often the refuge of those too cowardly to lie. (7) truth should not be spoken, but communicated. (8) realized by faith, once it has been arrived at by reason. (9) an ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
T.V: (1) chewing gum for the eyes. (2) automated day-dreaming. (3) the glass teat. (4) the plug-in drug. (5) the crystal bucket. (6) remote control death. (7) democracy at its ugliest. (8) the bland leading the bland. (9) that which enables you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
Ugliness: a gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without humility.
Unconscious, the: a realm of potential hell.
University: a place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
Vagabond: when rich, is called a tourist.
Virtue: (1) a quality which has never been as respectable as money. (2) insufficient temptation. (3) an inexpensive vice.
Wealth: (1) any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. (2) difficult to dignify.
Whole: that which has a beginning, a middle and an end.
Wise: a reputation that is built by agreeing with everybody.
Woman: (1) an animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. (2) a temple built upon a sewer. (3) a promise that cannot be kept.
Women: the maintenance class.
Women's rights: men's duties.
Wonder: the effect of novelty on ignorance.
Words: (1) things to kill time until our emotions make us inarticulate. (2) the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Work: (1) two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. (2) what you do so that some time you won't have to do it any more. (3) only one kind: discovering the truth about life and death and then living in accordance with it . . . all else is folly.
Writing: (1) giving the reader the most knowledge in the least time. (2) the art of putting black words on white paper in succession until the impression is created that something has been said. (3) the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. (4) a real writer is someone who has something genuinely important to say to others, and not merely to himself. /
X: in the algebra of psychology "x" stands for Woman's mind.
Xerox: A trademark for a photocopying device that can make rapid reproductions of human error, perfectly.
Yawn: a pertinent remark.
Yesterday: the tomorrow that got away.
Youth: life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Zoo: (1) a place which prevents people from getting at the animals. (2) an excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
Compiled and Continued by Kevin Solway
https://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/tmdict.html
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