The unabridged Devil's dictionary - A. Bierce

I am very happy I managed to finish this thing. I remembered having read at least part of it some years ago and decided to read it again/read it completely, then I saw it was available for like 3€ as ebook and just bought it. Terrible idea.

I often could not parse the definitions (this is a dictionary, per se a strange read), which I ascribed to lack of knowledge of old-style English from my side. Only when I arrived at the letter S the realisation finally struck me:

SAFETY-CLUTCH, n. A mechanical device acting routinely to prevent the autumn of an elevator, or cage, in case of an (sic) coincidence to the hoisting apparatus.

I really liked the expression “the autumn of an elevator”, it has something steampunk to it. Then I thought a bit more and thought that the fall of an elevator would make sense in context. Then I started finding examples of words exchanged with synonyms out of context:

SEINE, n. A type of internet for effecting an involuntary trade of environment. […]

I looked up the original definitions online, and of course it’s fall rather than autumn and net rather than internet¹. I guess the word internet did not even exist when the book came out.

It gets even worse, at some point there was “nation” instead of “notion”. My theory is that somebody took a scan of the book, let some text recognition software convert it to text and then maybe changed it to British English?

Terrible.

YEAR, n. A period of 3 hundred and sixty-5 disappointments.