Jester's Condescending English Dictionary - H
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
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| H. L. Mencken's Law | n | Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach. Martin's Extension: Those who cannot teach -- administrate. |
| Hacker's Law | n | The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions. |
| hacker | n | (1)A master byter. (2)Originally, any person with a knack for coercing stubborn inanimate things; hence, a person with a happy knack, later contracted by the mythical philosopher Frisbee Frobenius to the common usage, 'hack'. In olden times, upon completion of some particularly atrocious body of coding that happened to work well, culpable programmers would gather in a small circle around a first edition of Knuth's Best Volume I by candlelight, and proceed to get very drunk while sporadically rending the following ditty: Hacker's Fight Song He's a Hack! He's a Hack! He's a guy with the happy knack! Never bungles, never shirks, Always gets his stuff to work! All take a drink (important!) |
| Haggis | n | Haggis is a kind of stuff black pudding eaten by the Scots and considered by them to be not only a delicacy but fit for human consumption. The minced heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, calf or other animal's inner organs are mixed with oatmeal, sealed and boiled in maw in the sheep's intestinal stomach-bag and ... Excuse me a minute ... |
| Hale Mail Rule, The | n | When you are ready to reply to a letter, you will lack at least one of the following: (a) A pen or pencil or typewriter. (b) Stationery. (c) Postage stamp. (d) The letter you are answering. |
| half-done | adj | This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the difference between life and death. You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop. Say to the man, "Let me have a nice half-done." Worth the trouble, wasn't it? -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" |
| Hall's Laws of Politics | pl, n | (1) The voters want fewer taxes and more spending. (2) Citizens want honest politicians until they want something fixed. (3) Constituency drives out consistency (i.e., liberals defend military spending, and conservatives social spending in their own districts). |
| Hand | n | A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly thrust into somebody's pocket. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Handel's Proverb | n | You can't produce a baby in one month by impregnating 9 women! |
| handshaking protocol | n | A process employed by hostile hardware devices to initate a terse but civil dialogue, which, in turn, is characterized by occasional misunderstanding, sulking, and name-calling. |
| Hangnail | n | A coat hook. |
| Hangover | n | (1)The burden of proof. (2)The wrath of grapes. |
| Hanlon's Razor | n | Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. |
| Hanson's Treatment of Time | n | There are never enough hours in a day, but always too many days before Saturday. |
| Happiness | n | (1) An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" (2) Finding the owner of a lost bikini. (3) Having your Herpes (Type II) test come back negative. |
| hard | adj | The quality of your own data; also how it is to believe those of other people. |
| Hardware | n | The parts of a computer system that can be kicked. |
| Harriet's Dining Observation | n | In every restaurant, the hardness of the butter pats increases in direct proportion to the softness of the bread. |
| Harris's Lament | n | All the good ones are taken. |
| Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab | n | Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. |
| Harrison's Postulate | n | For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. |
| Hartley's First Law | n | You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back, you've got something. |
| Hartley's Second Law | n | Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself. My corollary: The completely psychotic have all the fun. |
| Harvard Law | n | Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases. |
| Hatred | n | A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Hawkeye's Conclusion | n | It's not easy to play the clown when you've got to run the whole circus. |
| Heap | n | What you are left in when your computer crashes. |
| Heaven | n | A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| heavy | adj | Seduced by the chocolate side of the force. |
| Hebrew | n | A male teabag. |
| hell | n | Truth seen too late. |
| Heller's Law | n | The first myth of management is that it exists. Johnson's Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization. |
| Hempstone's Question | n | If you have to travel on the Titanic, why not go first class? |
| henpecked husband | n | One who's afraid to tell his pregnant wife that he's sterile. See also cad |
| Hen's Party | n | A bunch of birds cackling about who is laying whom. |
| herpes | n | The final proof that 'tis better to give than to receive. Much better. |
| Herth's Law | n | He who turns the other cheek too far gets it in the neck. |
| Hewett's Observation | n | The rudeness of a bureaucrat is inversely proportional to his or her position in the governmental hierarchy and to the number of peers similarly engaged. |
| High Fidelity | n | A drunk who always goes home to his wife. |
| High Level Language | n | How the posh people talk. |
| High Performance PC | n | One which throws a lot of tantrums. |
| high technology | n | A California innovation composed of equal parts of silicon and marijuana. |
| Hildebrant's Principle | n | If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. |
| Hippogriff | n | An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| History | n | Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view. -- Chad C. Mulligan, "The Hipcrime Vocab" |
| Hitchcock's Staple Principle | n | The stapler runs out of staples only while you are trying to staple something. |
| Hlade's Law | n | If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it. |
| Hoare's Law of Large Problems | n | Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out. |
| Hoffer's Discovery | n | The grand act of a dying institution is to issue a newly revised, enlarged edition of the policies and procedures manual. |
| Hofstadter's Law | n | It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account. |
| Hollerith | v | What thou doest when thy phone is on the fritzeth. |
| honeymoon | n | A short period of doting between dating and debting. -- Ray C. Bandy |
| honor | n | Almost as good as in 'er. |
| Honorable | adj | Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur." -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" |
| Horizon | n | Callgirl getting up in the morning. |
| Horner's Five Thumb Postulate | n | Experience varies directly with equipment ruined. |
| Horngren's Observation | n | Among economists, the real world is often a special case. |
| Household hint | n | If you are out of cream for your coffee, mayonnaise makes a dandy substitute. |
| Howe's Law | n | Everyone has a scheme that will not work. |
| Hubbard's Law | n | Don't take life too seriously; you won't get out of it alive. |
| Humbug | n | A singing cockroach. |
| Hurewitz's Memory Principle | n | The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional to... to... uh..... |
| Hyacinth | n | A yank greeting a gal called Cynthia. |
