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The story of Ambrose Bierce told in the language of his "Devil's Dictionary", using hypertext language to create a fiendish translation of the life and works - and humour - of this acidic satirist and adventurer.
Headwords and definitions are taken from The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, ed. E.J.Hopkins, (1967). Definitions or part-definitions are between "inverted commas", whilst, with due attention to the flow of the argument, not to mention the reader's patience, every attempt, (even down to parenthetical insertion), has been made to obviate the necessity of looking up words in The Devil's Dictionary, it may on occasion, by the very nature of the text under discussion, be helpful, on encountering a word or words underlined, for instance, dissemble, to refer, with the simplest click of the mouse, to that alternative lexicon for a clearer understanding of the whole.
Keele University Andrew Graham September 1988 (November 1995) (C) Copyright
In the text, an asterix after a link denotes the second use of this word in the chapter, and [FT*] in The Dictionary returns the link accordingly. In the Dictionary itself, headwords accompanied by an asterix* denote additions to the Enlargement.
Hold back the edges of your shirts, Ladies, we are going through hell. (With apologies to William Carlos Williams) [1]
From an article on Noah Webster in which the American lexicographer is quoted as having written that "it is therefore probable that language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God", came a plaintive cry from the author that "I personally would have liked something on the language capability of serpent" [sic]. [2] This dissertation will consequently plumb new depths in an attempt to fill one small corner of that roomy abyss beneath academe. Ambrose Bierce defined hell as "the residence" of that same maker of An American Dictionary of the English Language, and as E.J. Hopkins pointed out in the introduction to his enlargement, it was from reading a mildly caustic entry in Webster's Unabridged that the former printer's devil and "'laughing devil' of San Francisco journalism" [3] found the impetus for his own lexicon. Another starting point might have been Dr Johnson, who took "sly delight in 'gingering' his dictionary with an epigram", [4] but The Devil's Dictionary belongs, if anything, to a tradition much closer to the literary, journalistic and satirical than to the lexicographic and was intended primarily as an adder of the "salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out" (wit), rather than as a "device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic" (dictionary).
In Genesis "Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field", [5] but Bierce's Devil redefined them either for their physical peculiarities, as the alligator, elephant, giraffe, gnu, guinea pig, hedgehog, kangaroo and ostrich, or for reasons more significant, the as horse, "the founder and conservator of civilization ..." and mule, "creation's afterthought; an animal that Adam did not name" - not for this dictionary the explanation that the creature is the sterile offspring of various permutations of quadruped. The adder, meanwhile, was "so called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living", [6] a play on words to which neither was Genesis serpent averse for he "was more subtil than any beast of the field". Hiss rhetorical exchange with Eve was brief yet, from behind the subterfuge of disguise, he did manage to pack in contradiction of God's warning to Adam: "Ye shall not surely die", spurious metaphor: "your eyes shall be opened", and a somewhat hyperbolical prediction: "ye shall be as gods ..." linked cunningly, this time in concurrence, with the other half of God's warning to Adam: " ... knowing good and evil." Bit here then, Eve, of the "music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure" (language). [7]
Christopher Ricks, in examining the use of word-play in Milton's Paradise Lost, quotes Landor's claim that the "first overt crime of the refractory angels was punning", a "wit ... worthy of newly-made devils who never had heard any before", [8] also Dr Johnson, for whom a 'punster' was a "low wit, who endeavours at reputation by double meaning" and Milton's play on words of "so little proportion to the whole that they scarcely deserve the attention of a critick" [sick]. Ricks' own belief was that "it was only rarely that decorum permits Milton's word-play ... to have the brusque simplicity which we associate with the word 'pun'" and he cites Raleigh, Arnold Williams and Empson in a tradition stemming from Plato's Cratylus as vindication for Milton's "ravenous ravens" and 'knowledge / sapere / fruit' type of pun, on grounds of etymology.
Although Bierce uses puns more liberally than Milton, neither should these be put down to "brusque simplicity". Delight is occasionally taken in developing the pun for the sheer hell of it, as in rarebit or deinotherium, but generally the word per se is the subject for, rather than the object of, vilification. The definition of legislator as "a person who goes to the capital of his country to increase his own", uses the ambiguity inherent in the pun to alert the mind to a further ambivalence in the concept of the professional so close to the heart of the American system. The effect of the first pun would be lost if the appropriate meanings of "capital" could not be found, or if they remained entwined with an etymology so diverse as to reveal another quite different pun in serpent's "capital bruise", the fatal blow to its head as administered by Milton, [9] or The Dictionary's own capital punishment. If this appears to validate any standard dictionary as an ultimate authority on such matters, it should be pointed out that the second part of hiss definition, "one who makes laws and money" is just as accurate as, and certainly more informative than, the one in that reference book - legislators do make laws and do make money. There is of course an insinuation behind the entry, but then that is the modus operandi of the devil.
The definition of Bierce's Devil for pun in either case betrays a note of self-deprecation which might also be saved from spoiling his "intellectual cookery" only if one remarks that, if 'salted' with wit, The Dictionary is 'peppered' with puns, for example the ante-chamber, divine and the multilingual belladonna. Emerging from such puns, apart from a dig at three of Bierce's favourite targets, respectively bureaucracy, religion and women, is an explicit reminder of just one of the many inherent inadequacies and limitations of words as definitive, the susceptibility of their referents to ambiguous signification.
It could be argued that puns, whether intentionally originated or cunningly imposed, may be an expression of freedom bordering on linguistic transcendence. Readers of Finnegans Wake would enjoy finding "shebrew" as a female hebrew, and be perhaps only slightly disappointed that any connection between its second syllable and another of Bierce's favourite occupations, compiling a thesaurus of ways to be drunk, was not included and would instead have to be made through their own scholastic ingenuity. However, Bierce's puns stop short of, inasmuch as they predate, the modernist dissociation of writer and language, preferring instead to define through duality rather than walk a tightrope between the intellectual and nonsensical. Subsequent development of the art by Joyce, for whom:
The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble
which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry
he can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard
him say he has a strong Dublin accent [10]
may escape both this criticism and the abovementioned one of inelasticity but then so does the substratum of a golf ball. If one makes light of such desolation and stays with the Devil's metaphor, the self-imposed limits of his disassembling might better be compared to the throwing of a garter around the world in forty years.
For all their varied appeal to the subversive mind, both the homonymic double meaning, and its close relative, the homophone (eg tedium - "Te Deum Laudamus") [11] are only a part of the language of serpent. A further factor in the distancing of Bierce from conventional lexicographers, for whom such devices are a scourge, is his use of parody against the very methodology of his medium - a ploy not without precedent in literature. Swift would affect false sources for his writings, prefacing them with an "advertisement" or notes from "The Bookseller", claiming their source to have been an unknown author, edited accordingly. Thomas Carlyle, so elaborated the technique that not least of the wonders in that work is whether the author's allegiance lay with the "Editor" of Sartor Resartus or its diabolic "Professor" Teufelsdröckh - or both. [12] Similarly, Herman Melville's "Etymology" to Moby-Dick and its "Extracts", supposedly supplied by a "poor devil of a Sub-Sub", give a mock - bibliographic twist to that particular example of the "short story padded" (novel), about what "Dr Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat ... was a species of gigantic Tadpole" leviathan \__/ ! [13]
The persona of lexicographer is built up variously. In mock - scholastic avoidance of the personal pronoun, Bierce refers to himself as "the / this lexicographer": abnormal, aborigines (1), hangman (2), kiss, motion, poker, riches; "the author of this dictionary": inauspicious, king's evil; or "this present and illustrious lexicographer": mad. A rare obtrusion in propria persona to which one might add the "author of this incomparable dictionary" under the headletter I, is to be found under patriotism and it is significant that the "enlightened but inferior lexicographer" in the comparison should be Dr Johnson, whose supposed quotation in abrupt (with "deference" in abruption, so presumably 'cross-deference' in concatenate) no doubt earned him residence alongside Webster in the infernal abode. Bierce never lost sight of his indebtedness to lexicographical history, though such allusions as are made to leptocephalidans do tend towards the satirical, as for example in Johnson's definitions of "oats" as "the food of horses in England and of men in Scotland" [14], as it finds echo under close-fisted, or another, by now customarily but nevertheless downright, derogatory aside to Webster under mad. [15]
Similarly, the parodic development of the lexicographic genre occurs through sporadic references such as "a Devil's Dictionary" readers of which are afflicted with gloom, "this dictionary" critics of which are affected by imbecility, "this incomparable dictionary", agents of which are "pestilent bits of" type, "this excellent dictionary" objections to which are nonsense, and "a dictionary intended as a text-book for the public schools" in which elaboration upon a fiendishly dubious etymology of incubus "would be out of place". The compiler's basic device, the definition, is also formalized as in club (for which "I am indebted to several estimable ladies"), riches*, ("these excellent definitions"), pretty ("We are aware that all authorities are not agreed'), and foreordination ("This looks like an easy word to define"). More prevalent, however, is the complete abnegation of lexicographical duty in which words, around one per cent of the total, are given either no definition, eg., hug, efferous etc., hash, chemise and amatory, or in various ways allowed to elude it. [16]
A dictionary in which aversion has the same definition as satiety and conciliation as concession, similar, as lace and seine, head and scimitar, or opposite, as hers ("his"), invites circumspection, as indeed does one which not only permits its "ingenious reader" to "conjecture why" in England, the verb commit "is one of the most irregular of verbs, its past participle being 'fullied'", but also instructs the same to "see", in cross-reference, words which on examination do not appear, for example from bow-wow, or bough-wow , and proper! On occasion a leaf is taken out of Roget's book and words such as corned, drunk*, tope, ethnology, fool, freethinker, and infidel are subjected to a veritable torrent of associative signifiers. While the first three of these may be of use to the Joycean scholar still struggling with intoxicating word-play in a Dublin bar, they more importantly constitute a rare instance of Bierce's readiness to allow into his dictionary the "very low and vulgar" idiom, sufficient for the purpose of humour but no other.
Prefaces to dictionaries are important for outlining approaches to those works. "Ambrose Bierce's sardonic Preface to the Devil's Dictionary of 1911" describes briefly the work's publishing history, makes several disclaimers - including that of cynicism, [17] addresses itself to those "enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humor and clean English to slang" and introduces a further persona - of which there are many, a poetic "Father Gassalaca Jape, S.J.". More approximate to a compiler's explicit statement is to be found in the definition of lexicographer which, having stretched the dictionary* definition's serpentine and elasticity tropes, proceeds to an illuminating evaluation of lexical authority on obsolescence, speech, growth and decay of language, and inclusion.
Much of the prefaced intention may be shown to be at variance with its application and in view of the, for want of a better word, 'flexible' nature of The Devil's Dictionary, the question has to be begged as to exactly of what "your lexicographer ... is only to make a record, not a law". The "literary Trinity" of usage, "Custom and Conventionality" acknowledges the transitory qualities of language. Certainly Serpent "makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense" but, treating the assertions in their general context, they do reveal an antipathy to forms of authority which is not to exclude that domain which is hiss. Bierce, the writer and journalist, was well aware of an anarchic basis to language and the limitations of attempts to govern it. If this critical stance, coming as it does from a lexicographer*, seems slightly hypocritical, it might be helpful to bear in mind, whose "chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature" that it is satire (2), "an obsolete kind of literary composition". If the critical stance doesn't seem hypocritical, or if it is not helpful to bear in mind that it is satire, and about all this one is quite positive, then one must conclude that The Devil's Dictionary is indeed not "a record" but "a law", its author not "one who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantages of seeming to be what he despises" (hypocrite) and that one is therefore "mistaken at the top of one's voice"!
For certain lexical conventions the question of choice between record or legality does not arise in The Dictionary. To most intents and purposes they are, on the occasions used, neither. The Arabic derivation of alcohol is legitimate but more dubious are the etymologies for acrobat ("crow-bait"), bassinet ("berceaunette" - presumably a small cradle, not un bassin), court plaster (under fashion), gold, mosaic ("from Moses ... ") and woman ("wolfman"). With the Latinate Bierce does not stray quite so far and up to a point the histories of miscreant, generous, halcyon, hammer, exception and compunction have an element of accuracy, as to a lesser degree do barber (conflation of "barbarus" and "barba"), conjugal ("mutual ... yoke"), "simulation" (under opera) and "sincere" (under great seal and seal). However, the purpose of historical principle remains subservient to that of definition and the care taken by the etymologist in its precise presentation was perhaps diminished by his discovery of that area of "ravenous ravens" punning in which wit had been preceded by the intrinsic origin of the word.
Specious Latin appellations are given to "Jackass rabbit" under hare as "Felis Nevadensis", camel ("Splaypes humpidorus"), hog ("Porcus Rockefelleri") and pig ("Porcus omnivorus"). The potentially libelous nature of the third of these apparently did not deter the devilish natural historian and in hiss defence one could claim, with a certain amount of validity that for all the evils of American capitalism, Rockefeller was but one member of that race "Pignoramus intolerabilis" - "the human hog" whose "grunt" was slang, and whom he treated with a uniformity of contempt. Despite the abovementioned thesauri of inebriety, the prefaced preference for "clean English to slang" ensures that acknowledgement of the vulgate is practicality inadmissible without due vitriol yet if the target is drawn upon lines of class the boundaries are less clearly defined than shoddy (in whose "bright lexicon" - as in French - the billet-doux is "a love letter"). Presumably Bierce had been intercepting correspondence from a lady in a prison (1) to a gent working for his sometime employee William Randolph Hearst. Webster had defined "Gentleman" variously as "in the United States, where titles and distinctions of rank do not exist, the term is applied to men of education and good breeding" and "of politeness, and civil manners, as distinguished from the vulgar and clownish". [18] The discrepancy between Bierce's sweeping condemnation of slang and his own inclusion of the colloquial, between Webster's and hiss definitions of gent and genteel is tied up with a characteristic twist of the tail in the quatrain from "G.J."!
Stylistic sub-divisions, for example: "abracadabranese" (Brahma), "youngwomanese" (horrid) "reportese" (lacteal fluid), and what sounds like a portmanteau of two philosophers, "Aristocratese" (rabble) also reflect areas of particular interest to the study of Bierce's world, including his attitudes to gender, classes (all as one), and the professions. Similar treatment is given to nomenclature such as the legal: a mensa et thoro ("from bed and board"), forma pauperis ("where Adam long ago ... sued for Eve's favor"), the journalistic: lodger ("Second Person of that delectable newspaper trinity") and the medical: gout. The support of the lexicographer** for obsolescence in general is continued under obsolete, though was he still thinking of wine when writing that "a dictionary of obsolete or obsolescent words would ... be singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech"? The preference of this connoisseur for champagne, madam, and his weariness of trying to unravel here the serpiform, requires that the definition of foreman as "Obsolete: See FOREGENTLEMAN" be spat out without scruple to avenge the impatient waiter, as is proper* in all the fashionable restaurants, to a poached ovation!
The origin of foreign tongues toppled with Baal , while the colonial development of "a language so haughty and reserved that few writers succeed in getting on terms of familiarity with it", English, has naturally been subjected to its own sets of geographical influences. If democratic Americans were keen to simplify things, assistance was rendered by The Dictionary in this essential movement. Vernacular spellings are implicit in embassador, harbor, labor, neighbor, rumor and valor, though the Yankee creates Problems which only a detailed history of the Republic (2) might circumvent, for therein lies "a permitted authority to enforce an optional obedience". This would not however work for the indigenous polecat which by any other name is still a rose, a mosaic* bloomer at that and one rimed in meekness.
Invention of etymology, in which punning constructs a verb from a noun, as in adder*, reappears in liver ("the seat of life"). The portmanteau of 'smoke' and fog is accurately recorded as being made into "smog" by Mr Edmund Yates, [19] yet Bierce's own, possibly best, neologisms, "futilitarian" (a certain socialist) and "femininies" (feminists) [20] have unfortunately not found currency in this dictionary and the "Neo - Dictionarians" have to restrict themselves to theological argument with the sacerodotalist. In the absence of a phonetic alphabet and any apparent respect for the subject, pronunciation and dialect are at Devil's mercy, often playing with American or foreign differences, as ("mispronouncing ... Ay-rab"), coroner ("crowner"), dejeuner ("variously"), "fire" etc. (under dissyllable), ego ("we"). finance ("the i long and the accent on the first syllable"), German ("a veller dot vas ... "), indigestion (pidgin Red Indian dialect), Magdalene ("in England the word is pronounced ..."), ordinary (S.W. States: "ornery"), Quixotic ("Ke-ho-tay"), reveille (with possible reference to the Civil War: "Rev-e-lee") and sheriff ("anar c,h,i,s,t."). grammar meanwhile is "a system" whose ambiguity skilfully defined, and in the second clause of which is the possibility that "distinction" lies either in avoiding the pitfalls of grammar or falling into them.
Classification, with the abbreviations for parts of speech by convention appearing next to the headword, is subject to little deviation, domestic being defined as noun and adjective without problem.. Two definitions of address are numbered, while the three for the favoured epigram, allowing for different dates of original publication, are not. Pluralization is singularly suspect, more than one 'Prohibitionist' becoming geese. Spelling is alluded to briefly in orthography and mousquetaire while the value-judgements which crept into the dictionaries of Johnson and Webster are rarely explicit, unless for material whose definition is "important" or intention, which "when figured out and accurately apprehended ... will be found to be one of the most penetrating and far-reaching definitions in this dictionary". While this claim may not in itself amount to a great deal, or if so, might be attributed to any number of other key words, there will be little harm done in a brief sidetrack on this happy hunt. The entry, of a type not uncommon throughout, undermines the established meaning and replaces it with, if not actually its direct opposite, as disannul ("the same thing as ANNUL"), then one sufficiently obtuse to be almost contradictory. In the absence of a contextual example - for hardly illuminating is the information that the definition, like the dictionary** itself, is (on prescription as) "a dead shot for worms" - it is necessary to take Devil's advice and look, outside the definition itself, at other entries for the light they could shed on the 'intended' victim. The particular verse for free-will, one of fifteen instances in which such comprises an entire entry, may lack some of the authority of the pronouncement from Milton's God that "I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood though free to fall". [21]
However, in the light of that paradox, arising as it did from Divine foreknowledge that His human creation would indeed fall, the concluding couplet of the anonymous rhymster: "Free-will, O mortals, is a dream: / Ye all are ships upon a stream", addressed as it is to "his chipship", floating down a stream, delightfully contemptuous of the forces taking him to the sea, does at least widen the scope of those topics which are in themselves liable to constrictive definition. A similar verse for decide, also in rhyming couplets, but this time from the ubiquitous "G.J.", provides a more complex scenario of intention for a wee autumnal leaf attempting to defy the winds, while definitions for destiny, habit and libertarian, only problematize further the conundrums - no less for Bierce than the bewildered reader - in this area of philosophy. It is, however, with the lexicographer's own intention that this paper is concerned, and if that is "the mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another" and "an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of the act intended by the Person incurring the intention', then it is only logical, for the time being at least, that one should continue to determine, without necessarily referring to effect - lest the rabbit chase the dog down its hole - precisely what those influences were.
The reminder that "down to the time of the
first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used
a word that was in the dictionary" and the lexicographer***
"was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator
had not created him to create", returns this study, albeit circuitously,
to the area of usage. Bierce's combination of the personae of
lexicographer and devil by necessity presented its own challenges.
The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary is a compilation of journalistic
entries made by the author over thirty-one years, between 1875
and 1906, under various column titles. Nevertheless, it did begin
under the title of "The Demon's Dictionary" [22]
and references throughout to events in Genesis, or their
treatment by Milton, show a continuity in the establishment of
a fiendish character, appropriately elusive, behind the mask.
As author of the dictionary***,
"Dr John Satan" gives us "one of the most useful works that
It is precisely with the cataloguing of this post-lapsarian condition, the "adding of funeral outlays to the other expenses of living" that Bierce's intentions lay. As the lexicographic conventions were open to abuse, so the 'grand style' was redundant. As he indicated elsewhere, for him "nothing new is to be learned in any of the great arts - the ancients looted the whole field" [24] and as revealed by the quasi-limerick attributed to "Milton" under demure, the manifestations of that muse "who has had a narrow escape ..." (calliope) are not even conducive to serious parody, let alone the mock-heroic. [25]
Equally archaic to Bierce would be the controversy over Milton's alleged sympathies with Satan as opposed to the Son. Either way though, what is shared by the authors of De Doctrina Christiana and The Devil's Dictionary is, or certainly should be, a more than passing concern for the fate of the soul. If Bierce is openly playing devil's advocate he dispenses with the anachronistic artillery of the Miltonic war in Heaven and transcribes Serpent's tongue. Bearing in mind the author's experiences in the Civil War and the preoccupation of many of his short stories with that event, as well as with death to which it was a major contributor, it is not surprising to find traces of the bellicose and macabre in The Dictionary as the sword is replaced by the pen. The conflict is now waged on the level of semantics. Defined by the O.E.D. as a "contention about words", and, for the first time, by Webster, as "a game of word-making", [26] logomachy is for Bierce "a war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim - bladder of self - esteem". With a similar military metaphor, hiss own controversy will be not with "the injurious cannon-ball" but "spittle or ink". Quite what the devil, he, was to advocate, if anything, remains to be explored.
The Dictionary, then, is for fallen man. Mankind long ago succumbed to tongue of serpent and Bierce's concern was to show the state to which language, and the society using it, had degenerated. Bierce's Devil felt no need to topple him from a state of innocence, only a necessity to record the hypocrisies and evils which are the proud legacy of "Rev John Satan" (LL.D.). Punning and insinuation are not now being originated simply to subvert, as Satan's were in Heaven and Eden, they are being used to record the distances which have developed between some ideal state of truth, of unambivalent semantic bliss, and the world the journalist saw around him in the second half of nineteenth century America.
Read on: Bierce and a changing America - Chapter 2
Andrew Graham, Keele University
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