Related:

• Interpreter, n.: One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity.
  He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscience, omnipotent....
• UNDERSTANDING, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house.
  Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse....
• 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....
• DAWN, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh.
  They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe yea...
• NEIGHBOR, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.
  -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary...
• POPULIST, n. A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansa
  characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere....