Daily Inspiration Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce takes a sacred verb and drags it through the gutter with relish. "Anoint" carries the perfume of divine legitimacy: oil on the head, blessing from above, a ritual that supposedly transforms an ordinary man into a chosen vessel. Bierce flips it into a mechanics lesson. To anoint is not to sanctify but to lubricate - a practical act performed on someone "already sufficiently slippery". The joke lands because it treats political holiness as a public-relations problem: power isn’t earned or bestowed by God; it’s maintained by reducing friction.

The definition also smuggles in a theory of governance. Kings and "great functionary" types are "slippery" not because they’re graceful but because they evade accountability. They slide out of consequence, promises, even meaning. Anointing, then, is the institutional support system - clergy, courtiers, patriotic pageantry, respectable language - that keeps the ruling class moving smoothly over the objections of the governed.

Context matters: Bierce writes as a journalist shaped by the Civil War’s carnage and the Gilded Age’s frauds, when sanctimony and authority often served as camouflage for brutality and corruption. His Devil's Dictionary format mimics the neutral tone of a lexicon, then weaponizes it; the straight-faced "v". is part of the attack. By parodying the dictionary - society’s apparatus for defining reality - Bierce implies the real scandal isn’t that leaders are slippery. It’s that we keep reaching for the oil.