Sarcastic, occasionally smart-alecky lexicography with facetiae has a history. Even the celebrated yet scholarly Samuel Johnson was not above, for example, defining oats as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people” [1]. Kelly-Bootle’s first edition was entitled The devil’s DP dictionary [2] with a manifest debt to Ambrose Bierce’s irrepressible The devils’s dictionary [3], while the current edition draws its name and inspiration from Elgozy’s untranslated Le contradictionnaire [4]. The precise reason for the name change is not given.

This second edition includes about 550 entries reflecting the microcomputer culture that has arisen since the publication of the first edition in 1981. The older entries drawing on the mainframe and minicomputer culture seem less funny to me, probably because I have had less experience with those machines. Most humor--certainly the cerebral kind on display here--is culture-dependent.

In fact, humor, even more than beauty or obscenity, is also in the eye of the beholder. As Kelly-Bootle (who is fond of gratuitous foreign phrases) might say, de gustibus non est disputandum. For example, is the following definition funny or witty or merely politically incorrect?

disability n. (PC) A hidden or euphemised deficiency.

Thus 8080 SEGMENTED memory is “address-challenged.” Similarly, an employer can no longer ask job-seekers if they are addicted to alcohol, absenteeism, or BASIC.

A dictionary is a difficult read, simply because the context changes in every paragraph, so I would not recommend that this small volume be consumed at a single sitting. Rather, keep it handy so that a few pages can be savored whenever a good laugh or a trenchant insight is required. As in Bierce’s book, perhaps the best material is in the commentaries. In the “Luddite” entry, for example, Kelly-Bootle notes that

Ironically, most Luddite programmers quickly achieve DPM status, which denies them both the inclination and the opportunity to sabotage….

Satirists have their favorite targets. Bierce liked to skewer “our holy religion,” philosophy, Mammon, and romance. Although Kelly-Bootle’s dictionary is nominally restricted to computer-related words, his definitions often have broader, usually social and ironic, implications, as in the definition of “disability,” or a political message, as in the definition of “Luddite.” His Weltanschauung cannot be contained within a computer context. He is simply a first-class cynic, defined by Bierce as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.…”