Eccentricity
n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.

Education
n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Egotist
n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Elector
n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man’s choice.

Executive
n. An officer of the Government, whose duty it is to enforce the wishes of the legislative power until such time as the judicial department shall be pleased to pronounce them invalid and of no effect.

Selections taken from the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce as they apply to the 45^th president of the United States.

Damn
v. A word formerly much used by the Paphlagonians, the meaning of which is lost. By the learned Dr. Dolabelly Gak it is believed to have been a term of satisfaction, implying the highest possible degree of mental tranquillity. Professor Groke, on the contrary, thinks it expressed an emotion of tumultuous delight, because it so frequently occurs in combination with the word jod or god, meaning “joy.” It would be with great diffidence that I should advance an opinion conflicting with that of either of these formidable authorities.

Dance
v.i. To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with arms about your neighbor’s wife or daughter. There are many kinds of dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly loved by the vicious.

Day
n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper — the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap.

Degenerate
adj. Less conspicuously admirable than one’s ancestors. The contemporaries of Homer were striking examples of degeneracy; it required ten of them to raise a rock or a riot that one of the heroes of the Trojan war could have raised with ease. Homer never tires of sneering at “men who live in these degenerate days,” which is perhaps why they suffered him to beg his bread — a marked instance of returning good for evil, by the way, for if they had forbidden him he would certainly have starved.

Degradation
n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.

Delegation
n. In American politics, an article of merchandise that comes in sets.

Destiny
n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.

Dictator
n. The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of despotism to the plague of anarchy.

Disobedience
n. The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

Dullard
n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. The Dullards came in with Adam, and being both numerous and sturdy have overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude. The Dullards came originally from Boeotia, whence they were driven by stress of starvation, their dullness having blighted the crops. For some centuries they infested Philistia, and many of them are called Philistines to this day. In the turbulent times of the Crusades they withdrew thence and gradually overspread all Europe, occupying most of the high places in politics, art, literature, science and theology. Since a detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth, immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral.

Selections taken from the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce as they apply to the 45^th president of the United States.