Man, N.: An Animal So Lost In Rapturous Contemplation Of What He Thinks He Is As To Overlook What He Indubitably Ought To Be.

Related:

• Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
  His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada....
• MAN: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
  His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada....
• Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks e is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
  His hief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own pecies, which, however, multiplies with such insistent apidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada....
• TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own.
  Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a privation of which he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness by the coat-skirt of the male and the train of the female, and by a marked tendency to ornament that part of his attire where the tail should be, and indubitably once was....
• COMPROMISE, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have
  and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due....
• SOPHISTRY, n. The controversial method of an opponent, distinguished from one's own by superior insincerity and fooling.
  This method is that of the later Sophists, a Grecian sect of philosophers who began by teaching wisdom, prudence, science, art and, in brief, whatever men ought to know, but lost themselves in a maze of quibbles and a fog of words....
• AUCTIONEER, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• SLANG, n. The grunt of the human hog (_Pignoramus intolerabilis_) with an audible memory.
  The speech of one who utters with his tongue what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing the feat of a parrot....
• Mankind... infests the whole habitable Earth and Canada. -- Ambrose Bierce