strannikov's High Definitions

Absurdism: teleological suspension of the rational.

Adolescence: variant spelling of "addle essence".

Adult: variant spelling of "a dolt".

Alone: with no good excuse for dishonesty.

Art: any product of human imagination to which interpretation adheres.

Assertion: the indispensable preface to all that is subsequently deemed “true”.

Astrobiology: variant spelling of "bioastrology".

Atheism: never godlessness, but the worship of some smaller local deity.

Automobile: a four-wheeled telephone booth; connected to his wireless telephone, the vehicle occupant is seated in the perfect machine for getting him absolutely elsewhere.

Ballot: a Möbius strip used in popular democracies for the purpose of voting.

Beach: a seaside ashtray that doubles as a broiling rack for dainty tourist flesh; along shorelines famed for overdevelopment, the ribbon of imported sand separating a polluted surf populated with underfed sharks from gaudy streets overrun with overfed sharks.   

Beggar: an invisible man with a visible cup.

Body: your only friend; your worst enemy.

Boredom: variant spelling of “bedroom”.

Brain: the large piece of wax between the ears.

Can: the categorical imperative of our sciences and applied technologies.

Cannibal: one who dines on human flesh. A sarcophagus is a cannibal.

Cannibalism: life, by another name.

Cat: a member of a family of furry quadruped mammals clearly from some other planet. The technological prowess that cats demonstrated in navigating to this planet regrettably has never extended to feline dexterity with the can opener, but this specific lack of dexterity amply testifies to feline cunning and intelligence.

Celebrity: someone who deserves a prominent obituary; a mass-marketed model of conspicuous consumption and of selling out. Each celebrity comes equipped with a crypto-/pseudo-/quasi-/semi-religious cult following: thereafter, their glib assessments of contemporary events and conditions are accorded oracular powers by their commercial sponsors and their target congregations.

Cell phone: an electronic communications appliance with which to demonstrate the inability to walk, cycle, or drive.

Cerebral: of or having to do with cranial cellulite.

Certainty: the sure epistemic means for attaining approximate, partial, or tentative epistemic ends.

Civilization: a vehicle without brakes whose system of propulsion is sheer momentum—its velocity is apparent only as it runs downhill.

Coffin: a piece of furniture that rearranges the customary relationship we enjoy with dust.

Congress: a bicameral legislature conveniently divided into two factions whose members represent voters with bifurcated minds and bivalent souls.

Crime: a survival strategy or tactic (typically entailing atypical degrees of risk) commended by evolutionary theory as dictated by necessity or permitted by opportunity, by cosmic coincidence within the purview of members of the lone species that articulates notions of evolutionary theory and enunciates survival strategies and tactics.

Death: quantum oscillation stabilization effected by gravity; the place where the weather is all shifting patterns of dust and dirt.

Decade: the temporal phenomenon that yields the odd "whoosh!" sound that some humans claim to hear once every ten years or so.

De-extinction: the brief stage intermediate to extinction and re-extinction.

Diplomat: a trusted academic, bureaucrat or celebrity whose job it is to antagonize and provoke her nation's allies, when not otherwise appeasing her nation's enemies or misrepresenting her country's interests abroad; one adept at vitiating her own credibility.

Dog: a quadruped mammal whose generally affable and obedient demeanor entitles him to be treated like a human being (cf. Human being: a biped mammal whose generally sullen and self-willed behavior requires his being treated like a cur.)

Earth: a planetary nursery for infants and gods; the locality where eight billion planets and universes collide daily.

Economics: the rudder of mortality by which humans guide their lives through their ephemeral social and transient political existence.

Education: the preferred instrument for banishing literacy and numeracy from a society or generation.

Empowerment: dependence on philanthropy, addiction to therapeutics, or reliance upon assistance.

Enviromaniac: one incapable of seeing forests, trees, and people simultaneously.

Ethics: window-dresser at the Ego & Expediency Emporium.

Evolution: the theory of biological extinction proposed by the very species immune to extinction.

Exercise: the bodily exertions of those who do not perform manual labor for  a living.

Fame: immortality, in the present tense.

Flatter: to remind a patron of the obvious.

Floor: a bookshelf of last resort.

Fog: a cloud with no conspicuous ambition for altitude or elevation.

Gossip: in your presence, what that fellow over there did this past weekend; in your absence, what you did this past weekend.

Have: to ignore.

History: the records of human deeds and events that have occurred mostly in spite of human intent, the records themselves subject to endless dispute or enduring neglect; the continuous temporal sequence of anachronism, atavism, and recurrence.

Hollywood: purveyor of stale bread and somniferous circuses, the former served with rancid clamor or saccharine sentiment, the latter presented in ghastly dreamlessness with glib sermonizing.

Holy: an adjective without comparative and superlative forms.

Human being: a fruit or vegetable with animal aspirations and a mineral  destiny.

Idealism: the cheery midwife officiating at the births of Pessimism, Cynicism, and Nihilism.

If: the actual substance of every actual future.

Intellectual: one who deems hypertrophy of the mind just compensation for constipation of the soul.

Interdisciplinary: highly fuzzy, or aptly approximate, with or without requisite specificity.

Internet: the leading stage for anonymous exhibitionism.

Invalid: a desperately sick person kept alive to prolong the existence of his doctors.

Irony: the other universal solvent.

Jealousy: tenacity of desire that intensifies as soon as the object of desire sheds its original appeal.

Journalism: the practice of corrupting language to engender slovenly thought about contemporary circumstance; without doubt, the very lowest form of entertainment, though always in competition with formal education.

Knowledge: the incontrovertible residue of someone else's experience. Reliance on secondary and tertiary removes of experience is called “education”.

Laughter: a laxative therapy of risibility for anyone suffering from constipation of the soul. Its efficacy is determined when the sufferer looks into a mirror.

Law: the rules governing how human life feeds on itself.

Lawyer: someone who is supposed to be well enough informed to know how to break the law in order to get away with it.

Learning: the cognitive or intellectual function that thwarts the best intentions of the professional educator.

Life: a euphemism or metaphor for "cannibalism".

Litter: an outward sign of inward trash.

Lock: a device or mechanism intended to keep honest people out.

Maturity: the ruse by which the infantile, the puerile, and the juvenile extend their terms in office; the residue of disappointments (plural, mandatory).

Media: the mouths of tacit narrative assumptions and implicit editorial biases, promulgated for their value in promoting uncritical acceptance of asserted facts as "truth" and passive popular compliance as "civic engagement"; the class of unelected discourse managers who commandeer "free speech" for its own commercial purposes and political influence.

Medicine: the habilitation of hypochondria; a concoction or procedure of human ingenuity designed to keep nature from its course: nature, inexorable and irascible as ever, is mildly amused and only briefly deterred.

Memory: the firm or feeble grip the dead have upon the living.

Mirror: the cellphone's chief competitor.

Misanthropy: the philanthropic strategy of properly distrusting both tarnished elites and unwashed masses.

Misogyny: one possible outcome of a naïve idolatry.

Money: in worlds of two dimensions, the cure for every ill and the solution to every problem. The efficacy of money in curing ills and solving problems in two-dimensional circumstances owes to the perfectly realized forms of currency and coin in obverse and reverse.

Mortality: four syllables ending in “death”.

Mouth: in American public discourse, the part of the anatomy with which one thinks prior to speaking.

Mule: a yokel of the equine school.

Multi-tasking: the ability to do several things poorly at one time while diminishing the ability to do a single thing well.

News: the first draft of myth; any regurgitated report of events that transpired two or three days ago.

New Year's Eve: the annual transition from the same year to the same year.

Nostalgia: the talent for misremembering the prevailing meteorological conditions of one's youth.

Obituary: a public announcement of the disposition of someone who will not be attending your funeral.

Objectivity: the intellectual virtue of standing aside from one's immediate experience; a stepladder for the attainment of abstraction.

Opera: a musical theatrical production that illustrates the hazards and mayhem commonly attending the emphatic singing of vowels.

Opinion poll: the modern successor to the medieval Tarot deck in its purport to accurately predict the present.

Ought: the apotheosis of preferred outcomes.

Pandemic: an epidemiological term equivalent to a term found in the discourse of political economy, “globalization”. 

Parenting: the begetting of children so that they may be raised by someone else.

Permanent: subject to termination, obliteration, or eradication at some later date: commonly said of buildings, cities, and civilizations.

Peroxide: a neuron-synapse astringent applied to the hair.

Pessimist: a hyper-realist or an optimist of the Late Modern Era.

Petty: being or becoming smaller than one already is.

Philanthropist: a misanthrope with disposable wealth or discretionary income.

Philosophy: a muscular exercise of throat, jaw, tongue, and brain.

Physicist: one who has at least begun to learn what obedience to physics is all about.

Poem: an invitation to taste words in order to assess their nutritive value.

Poetry: the arrangements of words most often prone to explicit silence.

Political Correctness: the monocultural promotion of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance that displaces customary and traditional pieties while yielding fresh expectations of uniformity, exclusion, and intolerance.

Politician: a member of the tribe of thespians who, following the protocols and procedures of his stage, is enchanted with and enamored of the sounds of his own voice while saying little or less.

Politics: the popular mechanism for conveying problems away from their solution.

Popular: a word coming from Latin which means “of the people”; the equivalent of the word “vulgar”, which also comes from Latin and means the same thing.

Posthumous: variant spelling of "post-humus".

Postmodernism: the cockroach of modernism, on its back.

Poverty: ability to do without; inability to do without; inability to do with.

Precision: digital approximation for analog brains.

Procrastination: poorly understood, gravely unappreciated, or unjustly maligned conservation of effort.

Progress: the temporal myth sponsored by modernity that we live already in an irrevocable future.

Protestant: a self-shepherding sheep, susceptible when not prone to lycanthropy.

Quorum: the minimum number of office-holders required for carrying out the dictates of cronyism, nepotism, malfeasance, misfeasance, and ineptitude, in the true spirit of greed and poor-mouthing.

Rationalism: a toothless domesticated carnivore with sharp gums; the unwarranted valorization of a rare or intermittent mental quirk.

Readiness: the volitional state immediately subsequent to procrastination.

Reason: the mental faculty that placates our separate volitions in order to confirm us in our common prejudices.

Recognition: the habituation of mistaken identity.

Rhythm: the memory of conception.

Rock 'n' roll: amplified hyperbole or cliché of geriatric vintage in praise of adolescent frivolity and excess.

Salary: the income with which to maintain one's debts.

Satirist: a tragedian with a sense of humor.

Science: Holy Science, the institutional arbiter of the various and numerous intellectual disciplines, cognitive strategies, and epistemic approaches aspiring to digital assurances for analog brains. Its magnificent cathedrals and temples of study are staffed by priests and acolytes trained to speak in hieroglyphics incomprehensible to mere mortals. A terrestrial religion with celestial aspirations, its chief avatar is Applied Technology.

Self-evident: the status of a thing whose meaning or worth is unknown.

Senses: the faculties of seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and hearing that enable us to perceive the world without and equip us to hallucinate the world within.

Should: the motive for those brands of evil not inspired by Can.

Silence: a memory forgotten.

Social network: any internet platform that promotes rancor, extends the chronological range of immaturity, or invites subscriber solipsists and narcissists to maintain steady focus.

Sociology: the academic discipline that when not functioning as a pseudo-science performs as a crypto-religion.

Sociopathy: synonym for "social network".

Solitude: the virtue of restricting one's carelessnesses to oneself.

Spiral galaxy: the only evidence astronomers need supply us with to demonstrate our prowess for eternally chasing our own tails.

Spontaneity: flexibility of response, subject to consultation with one's clock, calendar, or appointment schedule.

Suicide: one who succumbs to terminal impatience; one who dies before and after dying.

Sycophant: the Greek word for "toad".

Talk: the movement of tongue and jaw that precedes inaction.

Teacher: when not merely an aggrandized babysitter, a duly credentialed bureaucrat of pedagogies of illiteracy or innumeracy.

Technique: in science and art, the virtue of repetition.

Technology: any intellectual discipline dedicated to proving that, while its processes can be described with tentative accuracy, Nature itself cannot be trusted to be natural in any preferred temporal regard.

Thought: the bridling of meaning for the domestication of experience; the chief impediment to speech.

Toilet: the locale of a man's intimate daily encounter with the metaphysical.

Tombstone: an engraved mineral marker (chiefly granite) designating a local mineral deposit (chiefly calcium).

Tomorrow: the most common assumption.

Transparency: the thin gauze curtain hung or stretched just in front of all things opaque.

Trash can: a garbage receptacle around which litter and refuse are placed.

Truth: that possessed by none; that possessing few.

Understand: to consign to the realm of the self-evident.

Vanity: an image whose perfect charm is conjured before a mirror just prior to its public display and its eternal disappearance.

Virtuality: the cordial reductionist realm that happily deprives you of every sensory appeal apart from the visual and the auditory.

War: our species' murderous solution for resolving grazing, watering, and mineral rights disputes among our herds; the perfectly natural consequence of apex predators' catching sight of each other practicing their common trade.

Wealth: the ornamental mask in which poverty makes all its starring roles; the assertion or pretense that any plutocrat is not in fact mortal.

Writer: a librarian seeking employment as a translator.

Xenophobia: tentative regard for distant relatives, sometimes as cogent as tentative regard for immediate relatives.

Yellow: the reigning pigment in canaries and cowards.

Zebra: an undomesticated equine mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa; its distinctive spotted markings have been shown to induce a high degree of astigmatism in most observers.