HUMOROUS DEFINITIONS.
A witty, humorous, or satirical definition cannot be universally acceptable, since it usually hurts somebody’s susceptibilities. No man or woman delighting in a burst across country at the heels of the hounds, but would think it rank heresy to hold with Pope that hunting is nothing better than pursuing with earnestness and hazard something not worth the catching; and the novelist who says æstheticism means, ‘none of the old conventionalities, no religion, very little faith, hardly any charity, and nearly all sunflowers,’ has few admirers, we may be sure, among the worshippers of bilious hues and graceless garments. Ladies ambitious of platform popularity would indignantly deny the truth of Whately’s ‘Woman is a creature that cannot reason, and pokes the fire from the top;’ and how angrily your golden-haired girl graduate would curl her pretty lips at hearing a young lady defined as a creature that ceases to kiss gentlemen at twelve, and begins again at twenty. Her agreeing or disagreeing regarding matrimony being justly described as a tiresome book with a very fine preface, would depend upon whether she had private reasons inclining her to venture upon Heine’s ‘high sea for which no compass has yet been found.’
The gentlemen who instruct the British public respecting the merits and demerits of authors, artists, and actors, cannot be expected to own Lord Beaconsfield right in saying, ‘Critics are the men who have failed in literature and art.’ The newspaper writer who pronounced a journalist to be a man who spent the best years of his life in conferring reputations upon others, and getting none himself, would probably demur at that by which he lives being described as ‘groundless reports of things at a distance;’ and if an American, he would loudly exclaim against the Autocrat of the Breakfast-table defining ‘interviewers’ as ‘creatures who invade every public man’s privacy, listen at every keyhole, tamper with every guardian of secrets; purveyors to the insatiable appetite of a public which must have a slain reputation to devour with its breakfast, as the monster of antiquity called regularly for his tribute of a spotless virgin.’
The witness who enlightened judge and jury by explaining that a bear was a person who sold what he had not got; and a bull, a man who bought what he could not pay for, thought he said a smart thing; but he had been partly anticipated by Bailey, who in his Dictionary tells us that to ‘sell a bear’ means among stock-jobbers to sell what one hath not. The worthy lexicographer lays it down that a definition is ‘a short and plain description of the meaning of a word, or the essential attributes of a thing,’ but does not always contrive to attain to his own ideal. For example, we do not learn much about the essential attributes of things when told that bread is the staff of life; a bench, a seat to sit upon; a cart, a cart to carry anything in; that thunder is a noise well known to persons not deaf; dreaming, an act well known; that elves are scarecrows to frighten children; and birch, ‘well known to schoolmasters.’ He defines a wheelbarrow as a barrow with one wheel, and informs us that a barrow is a wheelbarrow. Some of his definitions are instructive enough, as showing how words have departed from their original signification. Thus we find that in his time a balloon meant a football; defalcation, merely a deduction or abating in accounts; factory, a place beyond seas where the factors of merchants resided for the conveniency of trade; farrago, a mixture of several sorts of grain; novelist, a newsmonger; saucer, a little dish to hold sauce; politician, a statesman; and ‘the people,’ the whole body of persons who live in a country, instead of just that part of them happening to be of one mind with the individual using that noun of multitude.
Philosophers are rarely masters of the art of definition, their efforts that way, as often as not, tending to bewilder rather than enlighten. What a clear notion of ‘common-sense’ does one of these afford us by describing it as ‘the immediate or instinctive response that is given in psychological language, by the automatic action of the mind; or in other words, by the reflex action of the brain, to any question which can be answered by such a direct appeal to self-evident truth.’ Still better or worse is the definition of the mysterious process called ‘evolution’ as a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations; which an eminent mathematician has thus rendered for the benefit of English-speaking folk: ‘Evolution is a change from a no-howish untalkaboutable all-likeness to a some-howish and in-general talkaboutable not-at-all likeness, by continuous somethingelseifications and sticktogetherations.’ Putting this and that together, he who does not comprehend exactly what evolution is must be as obtuse as the playgoer who sitting out a play does not know he is witnessing ‘a congeries of delineations and scenes co-ordinary into a vivid and harmonious picture of the genuine features of life.’
Impromptu definitions have often the merit of being amusing, whatever may be said as to their correctness. ‘What on earth can that mean?’ asked Hicks of Thackeray, pointing to the inscription over a doorway, ‘Mutual Loan Office.’ ‘I don’t know,’ answered the novelist, ‘unless it means that two men who have nothing, agree to lend it to one another.’ Said Lord Wellesley to Plunket: ‘One of my aides-de-camp has written a personal narrative of his travels; pray, what is your definition of “personal?”’ ‘Well, my lord,’ was Plunket’s reply, ‘we lawyers always consider personal as opposed to real;’ an explanation as suggestive as that of the London magistrate who interpreted a ‘housekeeper’ as meaning ‘a sort of a wife.’ ‘Pray, my lord,’ queried a gentleman of a judge, ‘what is the difference between common law and equity?’ ‘Very little in the end,’ responded his lordship: ‘at common law you are done for at once; in equity, you are not so easily disposed of. The former is a bullet which is instantaneously and charmingly effective; the latter, an angler’s hook, which plays with the victim before it kills him. Common law is prussic acid; equity is laudanum.’ An American contemplating setting a lawsuit going, his solicitor said he would undertake the matter for a contingent fee. Meeting Mr Burleigh soon afterwards, the would-be litigant asked that gentleman what a contingent fee might be. ‘A contingent fee,’ quoth Mr Burleigh, ‘is this—if the lawyer loses the case, he gets nothing; if he wins it, you get nothing.’ ‘Then I don’t get anything, win or lose?’ said his questioner. ‘Well,’ was the consolatory rejoinder, ‘that’s about the size of a contingent fee.’ So Brough was not very much out in defining a lawyer as a learned gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it himself.
‘What is a nobleman’s chaplain?’ inquired a legal luminary, perhaps over-fond of professing ignorance, ‘A nobleman’s chaplain, my lord,’ said Dr Phillimore, ‘is a spiritual luxury.’ It is astonishing how innocent gentlemen learned in the law are, by their own account. Addressing a matronly witness in a breach of promise case, counsel for the defence said: ‘I am an old bachelor, and do not understand such things. What is courtship?’ ‘Looking at each other, taking hold of one another’s hands, and all that kind of thing,’ was the comprehensive answer.
An Ohio school-committee must have been puzzled to decide which of two candidates for a school-marmship was the better fitted for the post, the young woman who averred that ‘respiration’ was the perspiring of the body, or her rival, who believed ‘emphasis’ was the putting more distress on one word than another; definitions worthy of a place beside those achieved by the English medical student responsible for: ‘Hypothesis, something that happens to a man after death;’ and ‘Irony, a substance found in mineral wells, which is carefully preserved in bottles, and sold by chemists as tincture of iron.’ All abroad, too, was the intelligent New York ‘health-officer,’ who, having testified that his district was afflicted with highjinnicks, being pressed as to what he understood ‘hygienics’ to mean, answered: ‘A bad smell arising from dirty water.’
At one of Sheridan’s dinner-parties, the conversation turned upon the difficulty of satisfactorily defining ‘wit.’ Forgetting that he was expected to hear, see, but say nothing, Master Tom informed the company: ‘Wit is that which sparkles and cuts.’ ‘Very good, Tom,’ said his father. ‘Then, as you have sparkled, you can cut!’ and poor Tom had to leave his dinner unfinished. Probably a worse fate awaited the Brooklyn boy, who, called upon to explain the meaning of ‘Quaker,’ wrote: ‘A Quaker is one of a sect who never quarrel, never get into a fight, never claw each other, and never jaw back. Pa’s a Quaker; but ma isn’t!’ The youngsters sometimes hit upon very quaint definitions, such as: Ice, water that stayed out in the cold and went to sleep; dust, mud with the juice squeezed out; fan, a thing to brush warm off with; sob, when a fellow doesn’t want to cry and it bursts out of itself; wakefulness, eyes all the time coming unbuttoned; chaos, a great pile of nothing and no place to put it in.
When the French Academicians were busy with their famous Dictionary, the members of the committee were at odds as to defining de suite and tout de suite. Bois-Robert suggested that they should adjourn to a restaurant and discuss some oysters and the question together. On arriving there, Bois-Robert asked the attendant to open de suite six dozen oysters, and Courart chimed in with: ‘And serve them to us tout de suite.’ ‘But, gentlemen,’ said the woman, ‘how can I open your oysters de suite and serve them tout de suite?’ ‘Easily enough,’ answered one of the party; ‘open six dozen oysters de suite—that is, one after another—and serve them tout de suite, that is, as soon as you have opened them.’ His definition of the two phrases was adopted by acclamation. There is nothing like practical illustration to bring home the meaning of things. Puzzled by hearing a deal of talk about contracting and expanding the currency, an American lass asked her sweetheart: ‘What is the difference, John, between contraction and expansion, and how do circumstances affect them?’ John was quite equal to the occasion. ‘Well, dear,’ said he, ‘when we are alone we both sit on one chair, don’t we?’ ‘Yes.’—‘That’s contraction. But when we hear your pa or ma coming, we get on two chairs, don’t we?’ ‘I should say we did.’—‘Well, my love, that’s expansion, and you see it’s according to circumstances.’—‘John,’ said the satisfied maiden, ‘we’re contracting now, ain’t we?’—‘You’re right!’ said John; and then was performed an operation which a great mathematician defined as consisting ‘in the approach of two curves which have the same bend as far as the points of contact.’