Jester's Condescending English Dictionary - B
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
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| Baby | n | A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other |
| Bacchus | n | A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Bachelor | n | (1) A guy who is footloose and fiancee-free. (2) A man who chases women and never Mrs. one. |
| Backdown | n | Feathers obtained from the side of a duck furthest from the bill. -- Good News Week *2 |
| Backward conditioning | n | Putting saliva in a dog's mouth in an attempt to make a bell ring. |
| Bacteria | n | The rear entrance to a cafeteria. |
| Badminton | n | The reason the lamb tasted off. |
| Bagbiter | n,adj | n Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. adj Failing hardware or software. "This bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar." Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING. |
| Bagdikian's Observation | n | Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele. |
| Baker's First Law of Federal Geometry | n | A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides by governors. |
| Balance | n | Something you lose if the bank pushes you. |
| Balls' Law | n | The angle of the dangle is directly proportional to the heat of the meat provided that the thrusts of the busts are constant. |
| Ballistophobia | n | Fear of bullets;See also Otophobia, Peccatophobia, Sitophobia, Taphephobia, Trichophobia and Vestiphobia |
| Banacek's Eighteenth Polish Proverb | n | The hippo has no sting, but the wise man would rather be sat upon by the bee. |
| Banectomy | n | The removal of bruises on a banana. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" |
| Barach's Rule | n | An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician. |
| Barbara's Rules of Bitter Experience | n | (1) When you empty a drawer for his clothes and a shelf for his toiletries, the relationship ends. (2) When you finally buy pretty stationary to continue the correspondence, he stops writing. |
| Barbarian | n | The man who cuts your hair. |
| Barium | n | What you do when CPR fails. |
| Barker's Proof | n | Proofreading is more effective after publication. |
| Barometer | n | An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Barth's Distinction | n | There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't. |
| Baruch's Observation | n | If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. |
| Basic Definitions of Science | n | If it's green or wiggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics. |
| BASIC | n | A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company. |
| Bathquake | n | The violent quake that rattles the entire house when the water faucet is turned on to a certain point. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" |
| Battle | n | A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that will not yield to the tongue. -- Ambrose Bierce |
| Beauty | n | 1 - The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband. -- Ambrose Bierce 2 - What's in your eye when you have a bee in your hand. |
| bedlam | n | Three women plus one bargain. See also chaos, confusion and excitement |
| beef stroganoff | n | A bull masturbating. |
| Begathon | n | A multi-day event on public television, used to raise money so you won't have to watch commercials. |
| Beifeld's Principle | n | The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young female increases by pyramidical progression when he is already in the company of (1) a date, (2) his wife, (3) a better-looking and richer male friend. -- R. Beifeld |
| belief | n | Something you do not believe. |
| Bennett's Laws of Horticulture | n | (1) Houses are for people to live in. (2) Gardens are for plants to live in. (3) There is no such thing as a houseplant. |
| Benson's Dogma | n | ASCII is our god, and Unix is his profit. |
| Bershere's Formula for Failure | n | There are only two kinds of people who fail: those who listen to nobody... and those who listen to everybody. |
| beta test | v | To voluntarily entrust one's data, one's livelihood and one's sanity to hardware or software intended to destroy all three. In earlier days, virgins were often selected to beta test volcanos. |
| "Better late than never!" | The single girl's motto. | |
| bi | n | When *everybody* thinks you're a pervert. |
| Bierman's Laws of Contracts | n | (1) In any given document, you can't cover all the "what if's". (2) Lawyers stay in business resolving all the unresolved "what if's". (3) Every resolved "what if" creates two unresolved "what if's". |
| Bigamist | n | A fog over Italy. |
| Bigotry | n | An Italian redwood. |
| Bilbo's First Law | n | You cannot count friends that are all packed up in barrels. |
| Binary | adj | Possessing the ability to have friends of both sexes. |
| Binary Tree | n | When the tree break in half but keeps growing. |
| Bing's Rule | n | Don't try to stem the tide -- move the beach. |
| Bipolar | adj | Refers to someone who has homes in Nome, Alaska, and Buffalo, New York. |
| birth | n | The first and direst of all disasters. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| bit | n, v | (1) A unit of measure applied to color. Twenty-four-bit color refers to expensive $3 color as opposed to the cheaper 25 cent, or two-bit, color that use to be available a few years ago. (2) What mozzies did. See also Byte and Megabyte |
| Bizoos | n | The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a basketball. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" |
| blithwapping | v | Using anything BUT a hammer to hammer a nail into the wall, such as shoes, lamp bases, doorstops, etc. -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends |
| Bloom's Seventh Law of Litigation | n | The judge's jokes are always funny. |
| Blore's Razor | n | Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier. |
| Blunderbuss | n | A coach which goes from Melbourne to Sydney, via Port Augusta. |
| Blutarsky's Axiom | n | Nothing is impossible for the man who will not listen to reason. |
| Boling's postulate | n | If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it. |
| Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom | n | Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress. |
| Bombeck's Rule of Medicine | n | Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. |
| Bondage | n | Bondage, or as the French call it, ligottage, is the gentle art of tying up your sex partner --- not to overcome reluctance but to boost orgasm. It's one unscheduled sex technique which a lot of people find extremely exciting but are scared to try, and a venerable human resource for increasing sexual feeling, partly because it's a harmless expression of sexual aggression -- something we badly need, our culture being very uptight about it -- and more because of its physical affects: slow orgasm when unable to move is a mind-blowing experience for anyone not too frightened of their own aggressive self to try it. -- The Joy of Sex |
| Boob's Law | n | You always find something in the last place you look. |
| Bookcase | n | Litigation about a novel which ensures wide sales. |
| Booker's Law | n | An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. |
| Boot Up | n | What you want to give to Bill Gates. |
| Border | n | Someone who pays to stay in your house. |
| Bore | n | 1 - A guy who wraps up a two-minute idea in a two-hour vocabulary. -- Walter Winchell 2 - A person who talks when you wish him to listen. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Boren's Laws | n | (1) When in charge, ponder. (2) When in trouble, delegate. (3) When in doubt, mumble. |
| boss | n | According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages the words "boss" and "botch" were largely synonymous, except that boss, in addition to meaning "a supervisor of workers" also meant "an ornamental stud." |
| Boston | n | (1) Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition. (2) An outdoor Betty Ford Clinic. |
| Boucher's Observation | n | He who blows his own horn always plays the music several octaves higher than originally written. |
| Bower's Law | n | Talent goes where the action is. |
| Bowie's Theorem | n | If an experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment. |
| Boxer | n | A bloke who stands up for the other fellow's rights. |
| boy | n | A noise with dirt on it. |
| Bradley's Bromide | n | If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in. |
| Brady's First Law of Problem Solving | n | When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger have handled this?" |
| brain | n,v | n The apparatus with which we think that we think. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" v To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of error in an opponent. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| brain-damaged, generalization of "Honeywell Brain Damage" (HBD) | adj | a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Multics, Obviously wrong; cretinous; demented. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he/she should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is bad; it also implies it is unusable. |
| Brazier | n | Something to warm your hands on. |
| Bride | n | A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| briefcase | n | A trial where the jury gets together and forms a lynching party. |
| British Israelites | pl, n | The British Israelites believe the white Anglo-Saxons of Britain to be descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel deported by Sargon of Assyria on the fall of Sumeria in 721 B.C. ... They further believe that the future can be foretold by the measurements of the Great Pyramid, which probably means it will be big and yellow and in the hand of the Arabs. They also believe that if you sleep with your head under the pillow a fairy will come and take all your teeth. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" |
| broad-mindedness | n | The result of flattening high-mindedness out. |
| Brogan's Constant | n | People tend to congregate in the back of the church and the front of the bus. |
| brokee | n | Someone who buys stocks on the advice of a broker. |
| Brontosaurus Principle | n | Organizations can grow faster than their brains can manage them in relation to their environment and to their own physiology: when this occurs, they are an endangered species. -- Thomas K. Connellan |
| Brook's Law | n | Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. |
| Brooke's Law | n | Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition. |
| Browser | n | Someone who looks but doesn't buy. |
| brunette bush | n | The dark side of the moon. |
| Brussels Sprout | n | A world famous statue found in that city. |
| Bubble Memory | n | A derogatory term, usually referring to a person's intelligence. See also "vacuum tube". |
| Bucy's Law | n | Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man. |
| Bug | n | 1 - An aspect of a computer program which exists because the programmer was thinking about Jumbo Jacks or stock options when s/he wrote the program. Fortunately, the second-to-last bug has just been fixed. -- Ray Simard 2 - A son of a glitch. 3 - An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect. The activity of "debugging", or removing bugs from a program, ends when people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed. -- "Datamation", January 15, 1984 |
| Bugs | pl. n | Small living things that small living boys throw on small living girls. |
| Bumper sticker | n | All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture. |
| Bunker's Admonition | n | You cannot buy beer; you can only rent it. |
| Burbulation | v | The obsessive act of opening and closing a refrigerator door in an attempt to catch it before the automatic light comes on. -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends |
| Bureau Termination, Law of | n | When a government bureau is scheduled to be phased out, the number of employees in that bureau will double within 12 months after the decision is made. |
| bureaucracy | n | A method for transforming energy into solid waste. |
| Bureaucrat | n | 1 - A person who cuts red tape sideways. -- J. McCabe 2 - A politician who has tenure. |
| Burke's Postulates | pl. n | Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about. Don't create a problem for which you do not have the answer. |
| Burlesque Show | n | Where attendance falls off if nothing else does. |
| Burn's Hog Weighing Method | n | (1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a sawhorse. (2) Put the hog on one end of the plank. (3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again perfectly balanced. (4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks. -- Robert Burns |
| buzzword | n | The fly in the ointment of computer literacy. |
| byob | v | Believing Your Own Bull |
| Byte | v | What mozzies do. See also bit (2) and Megabyte |
