An ointment for my cracked and bleeding crown."

Jum Coople

ZENITH, n. The point in the heavens directly overhead to a man
standing or a growing cabbage. A man in bed or a cabbage in the pot
is not considered as having a zenith, though from this view of the
matter there was once a considerably dissent among the learned, some
holding that the posture of the body was immaterial. These were
called Horizontalists, their opponents, Verticalists. The
Horizontalist heresy was finally extinguished by Xanobus, the
philosopher-king of Abara, a zealous Verticalist. Entering an
assembly of philosophers who were debating the matter, he cast a
severed human head at the feet of his opponents and asked them to
determine its zenith, explaining that its body was hanging by the
heels outside. Observing that it was the head of their leader, the
Horizontalists hastened to profess themselves converted to whatever
opinion the Crown might be pleased to hold, and Horizontalism took its
place among _fides defuncti_.

ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter
and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers
who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to
have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought
that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his
monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives
are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he
worships under many sacred names.

ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one
carrying the white man's burden. (From _zed_, _z_, and _jag_, an
Icelandic word of unknown meaning.)

He zedjagged so uncomen wyde
Thet non coude pas on eyder syde;
So, to com saufly thruh, I been
Constreynet for to doodge betwene.

Munwele

ZOOLOGY, n. The science and history of the animal kingdom, including
its king, the House Fly (_Musca maledicta_). The father of Zoology
was Aristotle, as is universally conceded, but the name of its mother
has not come down to us. Two of the science's most illustrious
expounders were Buffon and Oliver Goldsmith, from both of whom we
learn (_L'Histoire generale des animaux_ and _A History of Animated
Nature_) that the domestic cow sheds its horn every two years.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce

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