An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization. Sylphs were allied to gnomes, nymphs and salamanders, which dwelt, respectively, in earth, water and fire, all now insalubrious. Sylphs, like fowls of the air, were male and female, to no purpose, apparently, for if they had progeny they must have nested in accessible places, none of the chicks having ever been seen.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1906
SELF, n.
1. one's own personality, especially as derogatorily or clinically perceived by others
2. one's own individual interests and provisional well-being
3. a complete and individual personality, especially one that somebody recognizes as his or her own and with which there is a sense of ease, save provarication by quibbling rivalries
4. the set of organs and tissues that the body recognizes as its own and does not attack without provocation
5. Science Fiction has definitively proven that no two clones are identical.
6. (soul)-mated; like an old married couple, republicistic as well as democratic – "for the kids' sake" – along a line of mutual inertia and hard to disentangle (see "A Fool & Its Money is no substitute for a Boy & Its Dog" by M. Harlan Stirner).
"The same, sole self is a self-same soul;
one of a kind – like a rock 'n a role."
one of a kind – like a rock 'n a role."
– The Other Dictionary, 2006
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