Ambrose Bierce, the arch-misanthrope of American letters, was born on June 24, 1842 in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. He is, it is said, most remembered for "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which regularly appears in anthologies, and his other Civil War stories, but to me, Bierce has always been, before all else, the author of The Devil'S Dictionary , part of which was published as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906--thirty-one years after Bierce began publishing his definitions in magazines and newspapers--and was rechristened The Devil's Dictionary, the title Bierce preferred, in Volume VII of The Collected Works in 1911.[1]
The pleasure of The Devil's Dictionary derives not just from the laughter Bierce's definitions are capable of producing but also from its citability. Early reviewers saw that immediately: instead of actually writing substantial reviews, they often simply commented on Bierce's biting humor and quoted some definitions to prove their point. The work soon proved valuable in other contexts; Jack London, for example, quotes it in a note to The Iron Heel (1908). Present day critics have carried on the tradition, occasionally taking a definition or two to illustrate points in larger arguments about Bierce or about issues such as political humor or the nature of misanthropy, but they have yet, to my knowledge, produced a study comparable say to Roland Barthes essay on François de La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi's edition, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, which has over seventy pages of notes and an introduction of about twenty pages, is perhaps the closest thing we have to a critical engagement with the text.
My own reception of the dictionary has been similar to the critical response. I occasionally tell people how much I enjoy the work and quote from it to illustrate why. The definitions that I use may not always be the same, but I will usually offer the first part of Bierce's definition of an orphan, "a living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude--a privation appealing with a particular eloquence to all that is sympathetic in human nature."
Another response to Bierce's Dictionary, one in which I have also indulged, derives from a different kind of pleasure, the pleasure of imitating. The book gives one the sense, likely delusional, that one can almost certainly reproduce the brilliance of its definitions, and readers seem to have always been quick to try their hand at creating their own, something about which Bierce complained in his preface to the 1911 edition: The "more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of ‘cynic' books--The Cynic's This, The Cynic's That, and The Cynic's t'Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness."
A number of modern examples also exist. The Angel's Dictionary (1986) by Edmund H. Volkart is certainly the largest, but smaller ones, such as "A Devil's Dictionary of Behavioral Science Research Terms" by Richard W. Woodman, are available. The temptation to add to the genre was even made into a competition in 1973 by New York Magazine, which asked readers to send in their own devilish definitions, offering the following now well-known example, which is dubiously described as "an excerpt from a modern ‘Devil's Dictionary,'" for readers to follow: "conservative, n. A liberal who has just been mugged."
In spirit of that tradition, I ask you to post your own Bercian definition here. Your name won't be printed in a hip magazine, as the winners names of the New York Magazine's competition were in 1974, but the exercise is enjoyable. To start things off, I offer the following example, my own contribution to the genre, a riff on a common cliché, :
pessimist, n. A person who understands that the glass is half full of crap that he never wanted in the first place.
1. Bierce had published a piece called "The Demon's Dictionary" in 1875, though the 48 words in that dictionary did not appear in either the 1906 or 1911 editions of his book.
Message Edited by Albert_Rolls on 06-26-2009 11:27 AM
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