Read Ebook: Burgess Unabridged: A new dictionary of words you have always needed by Burgess Gelett Roth Herb Illustrator

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Ebook has 541 lines and 35355 words, and 11 pages

Why does your friend, reckless Robert, pause on the edge of the cliff? Merely to delight you with an agowilt.

When I taught Fanny, the flirt, to swim, and she found herself in water over her head, why did she scream and throw her arms about my neck? Was it truly an agowilt?

A circus poster is an alibosh; so is a seed catalogue, a woman's age and an actress's salary.

There are verbal aliboshes too numerous to mention: "I have had such a charming time!" and "No, I don't think you're a bit too fat, you are just nice and plump."

The saleswoman makes her living on the alibosh: "Yes, I think that hat is very becoming." She doesn't believe it, you don't believe it--it's only a part of the game--like the lies of horse-trading, the inspired notices of theatrical failures or a prospectus of a gold mine.

As Mrs. Ezra P. McCormick stood in the middle of Myrtle Avenue at the corner of Grandview Street the trolley car came hurtling past, ten minutes behind time. Wildly she waved her parasol, but the car would not, did not stop! Mrs. McCormick got bimped. Her bimp was the more horrible, because the conductor turned and grinned at her, and three men on the rear platform laughed, for Mrs. McCormick was very fat.

Did you get that raise in your salary on New Year's day, or did you get bimped? Were you forgotten on Christmas? Did you draw to a flush and fail to fill? You got bimped. Did you find you had no cash in your pocket when it came time to pay the waiter? Did that firm cancel its order? Bimps.

What did Mrs. Harris's servant girl do on the very afternoon of the dinner party? She bimped Mrs. Harris! She packed her imitation-leather suitcase, grabbed her green umbrella and walked away.

The girl who stood "Waiting at the church" got the biggest bimp of all.

Bimp not, that ye be not bimped!

Comic valentines are very bleesh; the newspaper "comic strip" with the impossible adventure ending in catastrophic brutality; stars, exclamation points and "Wows!" Especially a bull-dog, biting the seat of a man's trousers and revolving like a pinwheel--this is a bleesh.

Crayon enlargements of photographs of your uncle in his Odd Fellows' uniform are bleesh--Kodak snap-shots and flashlights of banquet groups.

Your practical-joking friend sends you bleesh foreign postcards from abroad; and your chauffeur revels in bleesh pictures of crime, with an X showing "where the body was found."

To the Philistine of the Middle West, the nude in art is bleesh. To the eye-glassed school-ma'am of Brooklyn, the paintings of Cubists and Futurists are bleesher still.

On the "jacket" of the "latest" fiction, we find the blurb; abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the "sensation of the year;" the blurb tells of "thrills" and "heart-throbs," of "vital importance" and "soul satisfying revelation." The blurb speaks of the novel's "grip" and "excitement."

The circus advertiser started the blurb, but the book publisher discovered a more poignant charm than alliterative polysyllables. "It holds you from the first page--"

Now, you take this "Burgess Unabridged"--it's got a jump and a go to it--it's got a hang and a dash and a swing to it that pulls you right out of the chair, dazzles your eyes, and sets your hair to curling. It's an epoch-making, heart-tickling, gorglorious tome of joy!

So, were not my publishers old-fashioned, would this my book be blurbed.

The bripkin invites a girl to the theatre, but he takes her in a street-car--on a rainy night, too! The bripkin tips the waiter less than ten per cent. of his bill. He carries a cane, but does not wear gloves. He frequents the manicure, and wears near-silk shirts, with frayed cuffs. His hat is "the latest" but his coat sleeves are shiny.

The female bripkin has a button off her shoe; she wears white gloves, but they are badly soiled. She wears a three-quarter-length grey squirrel coat.

American champagne is bripkin--Key-West cigars and domestic beer, and imitation coffee.

A bripkin umbrella is made of gloria.

The second-rate suburb of a great city is a bripkin, and so is he who dwells therein. He wears a watch-chain strung across his vest.

Bripkins are the marked-down gowns and suits, at the tail end of the season; and the green hat, "reduced from .75."

The cowcat will not talk, but oh, how he listens! How he watches! How he criticises! But why speak of the cowcat as "he"? They usually have large, black satin, placid abdomens, or else they are thin and nervous, with acid eyes.

How describe a cowcat? There's nothing about it to describe. It's a jelly-fish--a heavy jelly-fish, however. It sits upon your stomach, like a nightmare.

Cowcats fill hotel chairs, and the rockers of summer verandahs, knitting gossip.

Your wife's relatives?

Oh, that stiff collar! That binding corset! Those burning feet in the tight shoes! Yes, you are critched, but at the same time you have the moral support of being becomingly and fashionably clad. A critch is half pride and half madness--it's the martyrdom of fashion.

The unaccustomed exquisite in his hard boiled shirt, stiff cuffs and high collar stands critchety, but willing to endure the agonies of the aristocracy.

You may be too cool in decollet?, or too warm in your furs, but vanity vanquishes the critch.

You are critched when you have a picture taken, but that radiant smile survives. At private theatricals all the actors are critched with tights and swords and furbelows--trying to appear at ease.

The banker is critched with his silk hat in a high wind; and the dowager, as she carefully arranges her skirts when she is seated. But to be properly critched, you must be a Japanese countess, putting on stays for the first time in your artless, lavender life.

Many women have the culp that they are beautiful, men that they are irresistible, shrewd, or interesting.

A culpid actor is one who thinks he can act, but can't. His culp is that he is making a hit.

The mother has the baby culp; but the infant to other eyes is not so wonderful.

The woman with the culpid taste thinks that no other woman knows how to dress.

The author who has had three letters requesting his autograph, has the culp that he is popular.

That young man who stays till 11.45 P.M. has a culp that he has fascinated yawning Ysobel.

Who invented the diabob? The infamy is attributed to John Ruskin. At any rate, humble things began to lose the dignity of the commonplace; the rolling-pin became exotic in the parlor. The embroidery blossomed in hectic tidies, splashes and drapes. Hand-painting was discovered.

So, from the Spencerian skylark to the perforated "God Bless Our Home." Now the jigsaw was master; now, the incandescent point that tortured wood and leather into nightmare designs. Plaques began their vogue.

Diabobical was the hammered brasswork; diabobical the sofa cushion limned with Gibson heads. The decorative fan, genteel; the pampas grass, dyed bright purple; the macram? bags and the seaweed pictures passed; came the embossed pictures stuck on bean-pots and molasses jugs; came the esthetic cat-tail and piano-lamp, "A Yard of Daisies," and burnt match receivers and catch-alls, ornamented by the family genius.

Ah, Where are the moustache cups of yesteryear?

The type of the digmix is cleaning fish. At first it is disgusting, untidy, uncomfortable. Then, you begin to enjoy it, rather; and finally, as the clean, finished product of your skill appears, there is the refreshing sense of duty well done.

So with all household digmixes, stuffing feathers into pillows, peeling onions, taking up carpets, putting up stove pipes, beating rugs, attending to the furnace and washing dishes. You loathe the work, but, when it is finished, you're so glad you did it.

The mental digmix is less satisfactory, but just as necessary. Discharging the cook is a digmix. Breaking the news of a death, refusing a man who has proposed, explaining just why you came home at 2 A.M., accompanying a child to a dentist's, getting a divorce, waiting on a querulous invalid, having a lawsuit with a neighbor,--all are digmixes.

Why, to some, the mere eating of an orange or a grape fruit is a digmix! They feel as if they ought to take a bath and then go straight to bed.

But why enlarge upon a painful subject? After all, life is just one digmix after another.

He rings you up on the telephone, or she rings you up, and drilligates you by the hour, if you are too kind-hearted to hang up the receiver. Of course she has nothing important to say; you know she is leaning back in her chair, smiling, and eating chocolates.

The drillig calls in the rush hours of business, sits down, crosses his legs, and nothing moves except his mouth. He is never busy and never hurried. He catches you on the street corner, holds you by the button or lapel, in the middle of a cursing stream of pedestrians, and tells you a long, dull story. "Just a minute, now, I just want to tell you about--" The Ancient Mariner was a drillig.

The public speaker at the banquet rises with a bland smile and looks at his watch. "The hour is so late," he says, "and there are so many more interesting speakers to be heard from, that I shall detain you with only a few words--" and he drilligs on for an hour and six minutes by the clock.

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