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Disposable
Designed to be used briefly and tossed away forever, like razors, goldfish, income or friends. |
Dissertation
An interminable collection of footnotes strung together by an impossibly tedious narrative; the obligatory price of admission to the grazing pastures of academe. |
Divorce
Termination of a marriage before either spouse can terminate the other; according to custom, both parties enter into a knockdown legal battle that is always won by their solicitors and usually lost by their children. |
DNA
A complex organic molecule characterized as the building block of life and appropriately shaped like a spiral staircase to nowhere. |
Do-it-yourself
Hire-a-professional-one-month-later-to-redo-it-for-£500-more-than-it-would-have-cost-originally. |
Dog Food
The main course for man's best friend and senior citizens on fixed incomes. |
Donation
Money given voluntarily to a charity or demanded in specific amounts by museums too high-minded to charge admission. |
Downsizing
Corporate euphemism for 'Let's save a little money by firing half our staff and making the other suckers work twice as hard.' |
Downward Mobility
The decline and fall of the middle-class arts graduate, casualty of a tight economy and perhaps an innate disinclination for business; a gradual estrangement from bourgeois respectability and the company of moneyed friends, which the wise may secretly regard as liberation. |
Drag Queen
A man impersonating the kind of woman who always did remind you of a man impersonating a woman. |
Dysfunctional Family
A term used by psychologists to describe any household occupied by two or more related individuals. |
