V

VICIOUS: 1. To be natural. 2. To give up lying. (A word taken from the Zynrxi, and first used by the French at the Siege of Paris to describe the Germans; hence, any one who does anything impolite or acts in any way strictly in accordance with his innate tastes.)

Venom: 1. The juice of hate. 2. The sap of reformers, moralists and socialists. 3. The deadly smile of the optimist when he looks at the under dog. 4. The physical sweat of a defeated candidate and the emotional sweat of old maids. (Venom, like everything else, is subject to the law of evolution and variation. Between the venom of Cain and the venom of Tolstoy, several million instances could be quoted to prove the universality and beneficence of this breedy instinct.)

Victory: A matter of staying-power.

Vacillation: The prominent feature of weakness of character.

Vaudeville: A matter of verve, nerve and vermilion.

Veracity: The appendix vermiformis of the human character; a quaint atavistic instinct. (Veracity was once quite common in the childhood of the race; but as herding became more and more complex and human relations became more and more interjangled, there came into being a species of bipeds known as doctors, lawyers, politicians, editorial writers and preachers. Coeval with their birth the instinct to veracity weakened perceptibly until it reached the condition of nixus nihilus ni in which we hold it today.)

Vacation: A period of increased and pleasurable activity when your wife is at the seashore.

Vivisection: Blood-lust, screened behind the sacred name of Science.

Vile: 1. Anything that serves; whatever is useful. 2. Something done or thought by some one else.

Vindication: The subtlest form of irony.