English language -- Dictionaries -- Humor; English language -- Semantics -- Humor; Vocabulary -- Humor
YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
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.
Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame
To stay the shadow on the dial's face
At manhood's noonmark! Now, in God His name
I chide aloud the little interspace
Disparting me from Certitude, and fain
Would know the dream and vision ne'er again.
Baruch Arnegriff
It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was
attended at different times by seven doctors.
YOKE, n. An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, _jugum_, we owe
one of the most illuminating words in our language--a word that
defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy.
A thousand apologies for withholding it.
YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum,
Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of
endowing a living Homer.
Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth
again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with
whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and
cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice never
is heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and,
howling, is cast into Baltimost!
Polydore Smith
Z
ZANY, n. A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with
ludicrous incompetence the _buffone_, or clown, and was therefore the
ape of an ape; for the clown himself imitated the serious characters
of the play. The zany was progenitor to the specialist in humor, as
we to-day have the unhappiness to know him. In the zany we see an
example of creation; in the humorist, of transmission. Another
excellent specimen of the modern zany is the curate, who apes the
rector, who apes the bishop, who apes the archbishop, who apes the
devil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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