Related:

• Technicality, n. In an English court a man named Home was tried for slander in having accused a neighbor of murder.
  His exact words were: "Sir Thomas Holt hath taken a cleaver and stricken his cook upon the head, so that one side of his head fell on one shoulder and the other side upon the other shoulder....
• CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• HOMILETICS, n. The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs, capacities and conditions of the congregation.
  So skilled the parson was in homiletics That all his normal purges and emetics To medicine the spirit were compounded With a most just discrimination founded Upon a rigorous examination Of tongue and pulse and heart and respiration....
• Inadmissible: Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with
  and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone....
• On his way back from work, a driver came upon a horrible wreck in which one car looked exactly like his neighbor's.
  Stopping hurriedly on the side of the road, he ran toward the smoldering debris....
• X in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language.
  X is the sacred symbol of ten dollars, and in such words as Xmas, Xn, etc....
• DEPENDENT, adj. Reliant upon another's generosity for the support which you are not in a position to exact from his fears.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• 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....
• PIETY, n. Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.
  The pig is taught by sermons and epistles To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles....