HUMOROUS DEFINITIONS.

A smart, pithy, or humorous definition often furnishes a happy illustration of the proverbial brevity which is the soul of wit. Wit itself has not inaptly been called ‘a pleasant surprise over truth;’ and wisdom, often its near ally, is, in the opinion of a clever writer, ‘nothing more than educated cunning.’ ‘Habits are what we learn and can’t forget,’ says the same author, who also defines silence as ‘a safe place to hide in,’ and a lie as ‘the very best compliment that can be paid to truth.’ ‘Show him an egg and instantly the air is full of feathers,’ said a humorist, defining a sanguine man. ‘A moral chameleon’ is a terse reckoning-up of a humbug. Man’s whole life has been cynically summed up in the sentence, ‘Youth is a blunder; middle life, a struggle; and old age, a regret.’

Whimsical definitions are sometimes quite as neat and telling as those of a smarter kind. Dr Johnson confessed to a lady that it was pure ignorance that made him define ‘pastern, the knee of a horse;’ but he could hardly make the same excuse for defining pension, ‘an allowance made to any one without an equivalent.’ A patriot, some writer tells us, is ‘one who lives for the promotion of his country’s union and dies in it;’ and a hero, ‘he who, after warming his enemies, is toasted by his friends.’

Of juvenile definitions, ‘dust is mud with the juice squeezed out;’ scarcely so scientific as Palmerston’s definition of dirt as ‘matter in the wrong place.’ A fan, we learn, is ‘a thing to brush warm off with;’ and a monkey, ‘a small boy with a tail;’ ‘salt, what makes your potatoes taste bad when you don’t put any on;’ ‘wakefulness, eyes all the time coming unbuttoned;’ and ‘ice, water that stayed out too late in the cold and went to sleep.’

A schoolboy asked to define the word ‘sob,’ whimpered out: ‘It means when a feller don’t mean to cry and it bursts out itself.’ Another defined a comma as ‘a period with a long tail.’ A youngster was asked to give his idea of the meaning of ‘responsibility,’ so he said: ‘Well, supposing I had only two buttons on my trousers, and one came off, all the responsibility would rest on the other button.’

‘Give the definition of admittance,’ said a teacher to the head-boy. This went from the head to near the foot of the class, all being unable to tell the meaning of it, until it reached a little boy who had seen the circus bills posted about the village, and who exclaimed: ‘Admittance means one shilling, and children half-price.’

‘What is a junction, nurse?’ asked a seven-year-old fairy the other day on a railway platform.—‘A junction, my dear?’ answered the nurse, with the air of a very superior person indeed: ‘why, it’s a place where two roads separate.’

To hit off a jury as ‘a body of men organised to find out which side has the smartest lawyer,’ is to satirise many of our ‘intelligent fellow-countrymen.’ The word ‘suspicion’ is, in the opinion of a jealous husband, ‘a feeling that compels you to try to find out something which you don’t wish to know.’ A good definition of a ‘Pharisee’ is ‘a tradesman who uses long prayers and short weights;’ of a ‘humbug, one who agrees with everybody;’ and of a ‘tyrant, the other version of somebody’s hero.’ An American lady’s idea of a ballet-girl was, ‘an open muslin umbrella with two pink handles;’ and a Parisian’s of ‘chess, a humane substitute for hard labour.’ Thin soup, according to an Irish mendicant, is ‘a quart of water boiled down to a pint, to make it strong.’

Of definitions of a bachelor—‘an un-altar-ed man,’ ‘a singular being,’ and ‘a target for a miss,’ are apt enough. A walking-stick may be described as ‘the old man’s strength and the young man’s weakness;’ and an umbrella as ‘a fair and foul weather friend’ who has had ‘many ups and downs in the world.’ A watch may be hit off as a ‘second-hand affair;’ spectacles as ‘second-sight’ or ‘friendly glasses;’ and a wig as ‘the top of the poll,’ ‘picked locks,’ and ‘poached hare.’ And any one who is troubled with an empty purse may be comforted with the reflection that ‘no trial could be lighter.’

‘Custom is the law of fools,’ and ‘politeness is half-sister to charity’—the last a better definition than that which spitefully defines polite society as ‘a place where manners pass for too much, and morals for too little.’ ‘Fashion’ has been cleverly hit off as ‘an arbitrary disease which leads all geese to follow in single file the one goose that sets the style.’ An idea of the amusement of dancing is not badly conveyed by the phrases ‘embodied melody’ and ‘the poetry of motion.’

The ‘Complete Angler’ as a definition of ‘a flirt’ is particularly happy. Beauty has been called ‘a short-lived tyranny,’ ‘a silent cheat,’ and ‘a delightful prejudice;’ while modesty has been declared ‘the delicate shadow that virtue casts.’ Love has been likened to ‘the sugar in a woman’s teacup, and man the spoon that stirs it up;’ and a ‘true-lover’s-knot’ may not inaptly be termed ‘a dear little tie.’ Kisses have variously been defined as ‘a harmony in red,’ ‘a declaration of love by deed of mouth,’ and ‘lip-service.’

‘Matrimony’ was defined by a little girl at the head of a confirmation class in Ireland, as ‘a state of torment into which souls enter to prepare them for another and better world.’

‘Being,’ said the examining priest, ‘the answer for purgatory.’

‘Put her down!’ said the curate, much ashamed of his pupil—‘put her down to the foot of the class!’

‘Lave her alone,’ quoth the priest; ‘the lass may be right after all. What do you or I know about it?’