Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

This definition comes from Ambrose Bierce’s satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary, a work he developed over many years from earlier newspaper columns (notably under the title The Cynic’s Word Book). Bierce, a veteran journalist and acerbic social critic of the Gilded Age, used mock dictionary entries to puncture Victorian pieties and expose the vanity, cant, and self-certainty he saw in public life. The entry for “Positive” reflects his broader skepticism toward loud moralizing, political dogmatism, and the rhetorical style of people who substitute volume and certainty for evidence.

Bierce turns “positive”—normally a compliment meaning confident or definite—into an indictment: certainty can be nothing more than error delivered loudly. The joke hinges on the contrast between the authority implied by “at the top of one’s voice” and the possibility of being “mistaken.” Bierce suggests that forceful assertion is often mistaken for truth, especially in argument, politics, and moral debate. The line remains resonant as a critique of dogmatism and performative confidence: the more emphatically someone insists, the less that insistence should count as proof.