The Cynic's Dictionary

Author: A writer with connections in the publishing industry.

Boss: A personal dictator appointed to those of us fortunate enough to live in free societies.

Childhood: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.

Denial: How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist.

Experience: In the working world, something you can't get unless you've already got it, in which case you probably don't want any more of it.

Fitness: Salvation through perspiration.

Gourmet: A food fetishist.

Ideologue: Generally an obscure humorless zealot who finds fulfillment by spouting the ideas of famous humorless zealots.

Jeans: Lower half of the international uniform of youth, the upper half being the zits.

Kleptomaniac: A thief with breeding.

Laboratory Animals: Furry foot-soldiers drafted in the name of science. Some die nobly in the battle to eradicate cancer; others give their lives so that we might produce a peach-scented dandruff shampoo.

Martial Arts: A family of Asiatic self-defense disciplines consisting largely of sweeping ornamental gestures of the arms and legs; amusing to look at but disappointingly ineffective when one's opponent is armed with a semi-automatic.

Neighbors: The strangers who live next door.

Parasite: A base creature that extracts a living from the lives of others, like a tapeworm or a biographer.

Quagmire: Any situation more easily entered into than exited from; e.g., a guerrilla war, a bad marriage or a conversation with an insurance salesman.

Redneck: Popular term for a rustic male, but rarely employed when addressing one in person.

Smile: To expose a portion of one's skeleton as a gesture of goodwill toward a fellow human.

Trailer Parks: Latter-day gypsy camps scattered throughout the vast American hinterland; humble places of abode where hope dies young and tornadoes gravitate like flies to roadkill.

Unwed Mother: One who helps perpetuate the genes of an unwed father, without the latter's talent for becoming invisible at will.

Voting: The right of our citizens to do as they please behind a curtain, as long as they do it alone.

X-Chromosome: A line of genes that reproduces the female gender; a cause for war, small children that bite, the feminist movement, sexual harrassment claims (see "Anita Hill"), Affirmative Action, Opra, and talking at 3:00am about, "The future of this relationship."

X-Ray: A diagnostic tool used to detect existing cancerous growths and create new ones for future examinations to reveal.

Y-Chromosome: A line of genes designed for men only; the cause of virility, war, baldness, hockey, sex crimes, clever inventions and a disinclination to ask for directions when lost.

Zoo: A pleasant and instructive wildlife park, lately denounced for depriving animals of their right to starve or be eaten alive in their natural habitats.