Your Average Dictionary may well be a sine qua non if you wish to access the received lexicographical wisdom, but as Ambrose Bierce demonstrated with his wickedly acerbic Devil’s Dictionary – well represented in these pages – words don’t always behave themselves as we might ideally like them to behave.

This isn’t to say that dictionaries don’t tell like it is. They do if one assumes that two and two are always four, and that the shortest distance between two points is always a straight line. However, as Mae West once observed, a curve is the loveliest distance between two points. The Cynic's Dictionary is a book which exploits that curve at some length. And with not a little malice.