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Page 77
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the
Magazines.
POKER, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to
this lexicographer unknown.
POLICE, n. An armed force for protection and participation.
POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the
superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he
mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.
As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being
alive.
POLYGAMY, n. A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with
several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which
has but one.
POPULIST, n. A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found
in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; 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. In the picturesque speech
of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was
known as "The Matter with Kansas."
PORTABLE, adj. Exposed to a mutable ownership through vicissitudes of
possession.
His light estate, if neither he did make it
Nor yet its former guardian forsake it,
Is portable improperly, I take it.
Worgum Slupsky
PORTUGUESE, n.pl. A species of geese indigenous to Portugal. They
are mostly without feathers and imperfectly edible, even when stuffed
with garlic.
POSITIVE, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
POSITIVISM, n. A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and
affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte,
its broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer.
POSTERITY, n. An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a
popular author's contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure
competitor.
POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable;
indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find
it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as
thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and
diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all
countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of
substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that
liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be
unscientific -- and without science we are as the snakes and toads.
POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The
number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who
suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about
it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues
and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a
prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf
of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
PRE-ADAMITE, n. One of an experimental and apparently unsatisfactory
race of antedated Creation and lived under conditions not easily
conceived. Melsius believed them to have inhabited "the Void" and to
have been something intermediate between fishes and birds. Little its
known of them beyond the fact that they supplied Cain with a wife and
theologians with a controversy.
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