Has anyone here perused the Devil's Dictionary by Amborse Bierce? If not...I recommend it highly. Bierce does wonders with the English lexicon by applying sarcasm and cynicism in defining many of the oft misused words in the language!

Here is an example of one of my favorites:

Impartial, adj. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting opinions.

and another:

Evangelist, n. A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors.

Please add your favorites if you have some!

How can I quote a favourite when every definition in the book (300 pages or so) is a gem?. But I'll just cite:

CHRISTIAN: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

NEIGHBOR: One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.

POCKET: the cradle of motive and the grave of conscience.

RETALIATION: The natural rock upon which is reared the Temple of Law.

KING: A male person commonly known in America as a crowned head, although he never wear a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

DICE: Small polka-dotted cubes of ivory, constructed like a lawyer to lie on any side but commonly on the wrong one.

Then there are the stories and verses that illustrate some of the definitions.

Anyone who doesn't know the work can find it on a variety of websites including www.paganlibrary.com. And on the Project Gutenberg site you can find his "Fantastic Fables".

More "Bierceisms":AMBIDEXTROUS,Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left ARCHITECT,One who drafts a plan of your house and plans a draft of your money DENTIST,A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket QUILL,An instrument of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded by an ass GHOST,The outward and visible sign of an inward fear NOVEL,A short story padded The last two are truly revelant as Bierce is best known for his ghost and horror stories and is considered a master of the short story. (His one attempt at a novel, "The Monk and The Hangman's Daughter, flopped) I own three books by Bierce and have a trivia quiz about him in this site. tjoeb};>

I was in course of putting together a quiz on this delightful tome, would you still be interested?

I expect you all would get a perfect score. Does anyone have a problem with that?

Cheers

I believe that Quizzyland has room for several quizzes on the Devil's Dictionary...we'll look forward to it Exit. Please let us know when you have completed the quiz. Meantime we have Tjoe's Bierce quiz to tide us over...

I don't know if I could handle a perfect score...I guess we'll see what happens!

Any other Bierce aficionados out there?

Handle a perfect score? Methinks you probably could jazz.

Looks like I'm going to have to throw in a curly one or two just to keep you on your toes.

Will let you all know when I'm done.

Did not Flaubert write something similar ? Dictionnaire des Idées Recues? Dont know if there is a current English Translation though.

There was an English translation of Flauvert's "Bouvard et Pécuchet", including the "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues" published by Penguin in the 1970s, but I don't know whether it's still in print. Pierre Daninos wrote a similar French cliché dictionary called "Le Jacassin" in the early 1960s.

Well the quiz is up there in all its glory under Literature; Non-fiction. Sorry about the delay.
Hope you all like it. I suspect it will be a lot easier to do than trying to compose.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the heads up Exit, hopefully people will go and try the quiz, I know I will.

I tried it and thought it was excellent. I'm glad most of the questions were multiple choice rather than "fill in the blank" - this gave me a chance for some "intelligent" guesswork (There's no such thing as a lucky guess - when you guess right it's intelligent and when you guess wrong it's unlucky).

That quiz was a lot of fun Exit, thanks for taking the time to make it. Perhaps you'll create a sequel?

So which two did you and tabbytom miss out on? Was it too easy? I notice that you and tabbytom both did quite well and chac pipped you at the post.

If and it's a BIG if, I decided to do another are there any suggestions that would make it better bearing in mind the amount of space for questions and type of q's that can be composed?

To you both, thanks for the kudo's.

Cheers

The ones that I slipped up on were "callous" and "court fool".

Im not sure why I got "callous" wrong. Possibly I thought that Bierce would have applied the definition to a word which generally has favourable connotations, in order to show up our hypocrisy yet again.

With "court fool", of course I considered "plaintiff", but I went for jester, thinking that Bierce might have taken the opportunity to provide a definition that contrasted the professional foolery of jesters with the natural foolishness of their royal employers.

Not too easy - just about right, I think. It's impossible for most of us to carry the hundreds of defintions in our heads, so I appreciated the multiple choice questions that could be got right with a bit of thought, even if I didn't remember the answer.

It would be nice if some of Bierce's illustrative verses and stories could be brought into a quiz somehow - maybe by quoting from them and leaving a blank to be filled in with a choice of possible words. This would be difficult, though: there may not be enough space to quote at the kind of length that would be necessary

I take it from that, that you want another one. This will take a bit of putting together in view of the character limitations and obviously some of the biggies won't get in.

It might take a little longer than expected so please bear with me and I will let you know when it is up.

Cheers

I'm sorry, I can't remember which ones I slipped up on. Suffice it to say that I had to toss out what Tom described as "intelligent guesses" on a about half the questions and on the two I missed, I came up unlucky!

Please take all the time you need on the second quiz. Our appetites are obviously voracious, but at the same time we have the patience to understand that quality is better than quantity!