The Devil’s Dictionary is a classic of misanthropic American literature. It was written in bits and pieces between 1881 and 1906 by Ambrose Bierce, a well-known social critic, short story writer, columnist, gossip, and all-purpose cynic.
At a time when most Americans were exhibiting an almost pathological positivism, Bierce, and his great contemporary, Mark Twain, were taking an opposite tack. The result was some of the most truthful and incisive (which is to say derisive and satirical) word-smithing ever spawned by a New World culture.
Parts of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary have been consciously and unconsciously plagiarized by social commentators ever since. One important part of the human comedy in which he was largely silent, however, was the realm of finances.
Had this deep-seeing man with a pronounced desire to tweak the noses of the powerful lived in our own time, he doubtless would have favored us with many more definitions in this realm. The Devil’s Dictionary Of Wall Street makes up this shortfall.
It not only contains hundreds of Bierce-inspired financial definitions, but like the Bierce classic, satiric verse and disrespectful essays featuring an Internet favorite, Selig Cartwright, Goldman Sachs washroom attendant.
The Devil’s Dictionary Of Wall Street, by Michael Silverstein, is now available from Amazon in both print and ebook formats.