Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

This line is one of Ambrose Bierce’s satirical “definitions” from his lexicon of cynical wit, first circulated in newspaper form as The Cynic’s Word Book and later expanded into The Devil’s Dictionary. Bierce (1842–c.1914), a journalist and veteran of the American Civil War, became famous for his mordant commentary on politics, religion, and human self-deception. The “Absurdity” entry reflects the late-19th/early-20th-century American press culture in which short, epigrammatic barbs could be published as standalone items. Bierce’s project systematically parodies the authority of dictionaries by replacing neutral definitions with pointed social criticism.

Bierce’s joke turns “absurdity” into a mirror of personal bias: what we call irrational often just means “not what I think.” By defining absurdity as inconsistency with “one’s own opinion,” he exposes how people treat their beliefs as the default standard of reason. The entry satirizes intellectual arrogance and the tendency to dismiss disagreement without argument, suggesting that accusations of nonsense can be less about logic than about ego and tribal allegiance. Like many of Bierce’s definitions, it compresses a skeptical view of human rationality into a single, sharp reversal—mocking the pretense that our judgments are objective.