HETERODOX DICTIONARY: tweet-sized apothegms that burrow deep and fester until the reader is thoroughly corrupted, wholly immune to all conventional dogma.
The average dictionary might be more useful if you want to settle for the standard wisdom of the lexicographer, but certain terms are slippery, and require the touch of an aphorist. Especially a soi-disant one such as myself.
Over 75 definitions that were tweeted last year have been compiled here.
AGNOSTIC: the unbeliever who worships at the altar of a Question Mark because they’re too embarrassed of their own convictions.
AMBITION: the overpowering desire to be slandered by enemies while alive and made ludicrous by friends once dead.
ATHEIST: the type of person incapable of locating God except between bed-sheets.
CHRIST: the ideal martyr-type who knew his ideas would triumph only through his own sacrifice.
CHRISTIAN: someone who thinks it is possible to die for another person’s suffering.
CHRISTIANITY: a religion of revenge for those who suffer.
COMMON SENSE: how everyone can be wrong at the same time.
CONFORMIST: one who lives by imitation and by horror of originality.
CONSERVATIVE: one who is fascinated with current perversities, as opposed to the liberal, who wants to replace them with new ones.
CONTEMPT: the underground tunnel between admiration and flattery.
CONVICTION: the most obvious sign that somebody has failed to examine their beliefs thoroughly.
CYNIC: a person who knows too much but doesn’t believe in much.
DEMAGOGUERY: a fault in the thinker, an art in the priest, an accomplishment in the politician, and second-nature to the journalist.
DESPAIR: the indecision between the corruption of Epicureanism and the self-righteous poise of Stoicism.
ECOLOGY: the opium of today’s liberal elites.
ECSTASY: overwhelming bliss that extinguishes the contingent and particular, leaving you intoxicated with humanist delusions.
EDUCATION: the indoctrination of the inscrutable into the incurious by the impotent.
ENEMY: someone whose judgment of us is more honest than our own.
ENNUI: crucifixion for the rest of us.
EXPERT: someone whose prudence in avoiding petty errors gives her a blank check to perpetuate monumental fallacies by the dozens.
EXPLORATION: the polite word for conquest; driven by inferiority complex and a failure to communicate effectively.
FACEBOOK: social network designed for emo bitches to inflate drama since 2004.
FLATTERY: the most effective weapon ever invented to demoralize, corrupt and enslave anyone.
FOOL: someone immune to anxiety, forlornness, meaninglessness, or any other existentialist moods.
GOD: man-made invention that prevents mass suicides.
HIGHBROW: being educated beyond one’s intellectual level.
HISTORY: a narrative mistaken for some sort of salvation that engraves the memory of humanity, or the escape hatch from anonymity.
HISTORY, (2): that which first appears as tragedy, then as farce, and finally as a cliché. However, each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
HONESTY: a tactless form of conversation as well as the cynicism of prostitutes.
HUMAN BEINGS: mere puppets stuffed with red slop in order to reproduce history and its deformities.
HUMANISM: the very ideology that explains why we would nail Prometheus, the first humanist, to a rock today.
HUMILITY: imposture that appeals to the jealous and petty; egotism that compromises itself for self-preservation.
HYPOCRISY: the secret ball and chain that shackles every high opinion.
IDEA: a simulacra that eventually degenerates into a petty belief.
IGNORANCE: the secret to conviction; the boundary of certainty.
INSOMNIA: sleeplessness that erases the multiplicity and diversity of life, leaving you with nothing but new obsessions.
INTELLECTUAL: a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex; a self-styled expert of prioritizing rhetorical gestures, verbal extravagance, and modishly provocative poses.
IRONY: what once was a weapon for dividing things in order to expose hypocrisies and duplicities, slowly devolved to a self-validating tool of hip sophistication and literary savvy.
JEALOUSY: both a confession of discerned inadequacy and the respect among competitors.
LAUGHTER: scrupulous hostility. Even laughing at yourself only confirms the judgment of others.
LOVE: the hyphen between sadism and masochism.
KNOWLEDGE: a form of the predator instinct which governs us; a means by which we attempt to expand our domination of the world without displaying any virtue whatsoever apart from the will to dominate.
LIE: a crude stand-in for truth, but the only available alternative.
MAN: an inexhaustible source of humor for the gods; this creature is little more than the moldy film of a tiny planet orbiting a very ordinary star in an ocean of billion of stars in a very ordinary galaxy in a cosmos of billion galaxies…
MEDIOCRITY: the inauthentic life that consists of banality,hackneyed cliches and derivative production; blind faith in normality and horror of the new.
MELANCHOLY: the lethal omnipresence that underlies all outbursts of joy; the self’s brutal encounter with itself.
METAPHYSICS: the articulation of gobsmackingly awful reasons of what we already believe to be common sense.
NIHILIST: someone convinced that they belong to a biological species fated to extinction, a minor burp in the universe’s mad dash to entropic death; a worshiper of a Black Hole as God.
NOSTALGIA: a complex projection more so than simple memory; the invocation of a partial and idealized history merging with a dissatisfaction with the present.
OPTIMISM: an ideology that forces you to oppose all future moments that fall short of your expectations. Instead of expecting nothing from the future, free to experience as it will be, optimists only experience disappointment.
PARADOX: whenever underdeveloped insight collides with current stupidity; the litmus test of every philosophy as well as its final truth.
PEACE: the sleep of ambition.
PESSIMIST: a person exclusively devoted to untimely truths.
PHILOSOPHY: the conversion of cognitive vice into epistemic virtue.
PHILOSOPHY PROFESSORS: fools of philosophic pretensions who otherwise would have to play the fool in order to speak truth to others and themselves.
PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR, (2): an academic who privileges orthodoxy over originality, minutiae over meaning, and artifice over authenticity.
PHILOSOPHER: a writer aspiring to a title in order to hide their defects; a victim of their own system of absurdities; a lecturer whose material consists of tiresome verbiage sparked by either trivial truism or trumpery paradox.
POSTMODERN: the zombified narrative that survived the death of Grand Narratives; the crisis of critical distance; Andy Warhol’s Factory building lithographs.
POST-EMPIRE: attitude of affirmation that wears a cynical smile; dormant cruelty laid on top of aesthetic barrenness of postmodernity; Warhol & friends celebrating on top of disfigured bodies of undocumented workers who brought lithographs into the Factory.
PRUDE: the mask of the hypocrite and the disguise of the self-loathing person who labors under the pretense that repression is good.
RELIGION: institutions that exploit the social power of knowledge claims for specious reasons.
REVENGE: the act of branding those who have branded us, since we are all chattel stuck in the same pen of resentment.
SALVATION: the subtlest and most camouflaged of all torments.
SARCASM: mockery masquerading as an endorsement.
SELF: the greatest dogma, for nothing insulates as well as self-esteem.
SELF-DECEPTION: the pendulum between good faith and cynicism.
SINCERITY: the pendulum between self-deception and hypocrisy.
SERIOUSNESS: the first and fatal step towards dogmatism, as well as hypocrisy and pretense; common ideological sinkhole of petty bullshit.
SOPHISTRY: the adoption of truth to broadcast a deception.
THEOLOGIAN: a religiously inclined thinker who mistakes his articulateness and assurance with the more difficult goal of honesty.
TRUTH: either a premature insight or a symptom of decay.
TWEET: the sequential vomiting of irrelevant trivia consisting little more than intelligible whines or tragic shards of self-betrayal.
TWITTER: the privilege of the narcissistic class; the perfect platform for making a daily Faustian bargain between medium and message, philosophy and the one-liner.
VANITY: the single vice produced by all our foibles; the most natural cause of the departure from our true natures.
WISDOM: the final word of an expiring civilization; a clever form of inauthenticity.