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Shilpa KarhikAmbrose Bierce
April 19th 2006 03:36
Ambrose Bierce was a sharp-tongued and cynical American who wrote mostly short stories, poetry and verse and was also a harsh critic of others' work. A purist when it came to the English language, he published a small grammar guide called "Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults", with the explanation that "few words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however many metaphorical, derivative, related, or even unrelated, meanings lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading dictionaries". This low opinion of dictionary writers led him to create his own, but with definitions intended to be the opposite of misleading: "The Devil's Dictionary" was originally published as "The Cynic's Word Book" and its satirical definitions lampoon and expose doublespeak and hypocrisy, or simply make fun of human behaviour. Many definitions are accompanied by short poems, which demonstrate both Bierce's talent with words and his sardonic sense of humour. This one, attributed to "Halcyon Jones", one of Bierce's inexplicable pennames, is one of my favourites, as much for the definition as for the poem.
Weather, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
WEATHER
Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be--
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he'd preferred to the advantages of truth.
He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote--
For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:
"Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow."
The date and circumstances of Bierce's death aren't known - he disappeared near Chihuahua in revolutionary Mexico in 1914. There have been various fictionalisations of his death, but what actually happened remains open to speculation. Whatever it was, it doesn't seem that he would have minded; he was in his 70s by then and one of the last letters he wrote to a friend before his disappearance read "Goodbye - If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico - ah, that is euthanasia!"
Weather, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.
WEATHER
Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be--
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he'd preferred to the advantages of truth.
He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote--
For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:
"Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow."
The date and circumstances of Bierce's death aren't known - he disappeared near Chihuahua in revolutionary Mexico in 1914. There have been various fictionalisations of his death, but what actually happened remains open to speculation. Whatever it was, it doesn't seem that he would have minded; he was in his 70s by then and one of the last letters he wrote to a friend before his disappearance read "Goodbye - If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico - ah, that is euthanasia!"
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914?)
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