Tags: dictionary | non-fiction | satire

Firmly based on the belief that only selfishness motivates human actions, a dictionary similiar to Ambrose Pierce's has been created and turned into a cool book... here's a peak inside...

AUTHOR: A writer with connections in the publishing industry.

BOSS: A personal dictator appointed to those of us fortunate enough to live in free societies.

CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

DENIAL: How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist.

EXPERIENCE: In the working world, something you can't get unless you've already got it, in which case you probably don't want any more of it.

FITNESS: Salvation through perspiration.

GOURMET: A food fetishist.

HOOKER: A working woman commonly despised by people who sell themselves for even less.

IDEOLOGUE: Generally an obscure humorless zealot who finds fulfillment by spouting the ideas of famous humorless zealots.

JEANS: Lower half of the international uniform of youth, the upper half being the zits.

KLEPTOMANIAC: A thief with breeding.

LABORATORY ANIMALS: Furry foot-soldiers, drafted in the name of science. Some die nobly in the battle to eradicate cancer; others give their lives so that we might produce a peach-scented dandruff shampoo.

MARTIAL ARTS: A family of Asiatic self-defense disciplines consisting largely of sweeping ornamental gestures of the arms and legs; amusing to look at but disappointingly ineffective when one's opponent is armed with a semi-automatic.

NEIGHBORS: The strangers who live next door.

ORGASM: The punchline some women just don't get, generally because their mates have a tendency to rush through the joke.

PARASITE: A base creature that extracts a living from the lives of others, like a tapeworm or a tram controller.

QUAGMIRE: Any situation more easily entered into than exited from; e.g., a guerrilla war, a bad marriage or a conversation with an insurance salesman.

REDNECK: Popular term for a rustic male, but rarely employed when addressing one in person.

SMILE: To expose a portion of one's skeleton as a gesture of goodwill toward a fellow human.

TRAILER PARKS: Latter-day gypsy camps scattered throughout the vast American hinterland; humble places of abode where hope dies young and tornadoes gravitate like flies to roadkill.

UNWED MOTHER: One who helps perpetuate the genes of an unwed father, without the latter's talent for becoming invisible at will.

VOTING: The right of our citizens to do as they please behind a curtain, as long as they do it alone.

WHITE SUPREMACISTS: The most convincing argument against the theory of white racial superiority.

X-RAY: A diagnostic tool used to detect existing cancerous growths and create new ones for future examinations to reveal.

Y-CHROMOSOME: A line of defective genes designed for men only; the cause of virility, war, baldness, hockey, sex crimes, clever inventions and a disinclination to ask for directions when lost.

ZOO: A pleasant and instructive wildlife park, lately denounced for depriving animals of their right to starve or be eaten alive in their natural habitats.