THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY REVISITED......................

• Calamity :  a painful reminder that incurring 800+ penalty doubles are far more costly than letting the opponents quietly make their vulnerable games
• Bore : a player who loves the sound of his/her voice
• Congratulations : hollow and insincere words of praise offered to the winners by the grief stricken desperately unlucky runners up
• Chairman : a ingenious devil who covers secretly made decisions with the pretence of arriving at them through open discussion and debate during a full committee meeting
• Letter of complaint : an opportunity to knife someone in the back by alleging a wrongdoing which was in fact engineered by the complainant him/herself : an outpouring of venom and hate in writing 
• Accountability : an admirable but missing requirement for those who take up key posts in committee
• Partner : a term associated with being an accomplice to a crime, which usually relates to cheating at the table ( or backing up false allegations outlined in letters of complaint ) 
• Diplomacy : the art of lying to save one's skin by casting the blame elsewhere
• Eavesdropping : an intelligence gathering exercise commonly used by unscrupulous bridge players who seek to profit from any loose table gossip about hands just played
• Folly : turning a resolvable dispute into years of protracted litigation , bitter recriminations and crippling unrecoverable costs , leaving the lawyers as the only beneficiaries of such reckless spending 
• Insult : a cutting remark next in degree of enormity to a slight 
• Experience : the wisdom that enables a player to repeat the same mistake again in the belief that this time the anti-percentage odds will be in his/her favour 
• Applause : stage managed responses to grand announcements made by committee officers at AGMs 
• Defamation : what happens when a member seizes an opportunity to lie about another before issuing an apology , which of course has no chance at all of restoring the victim's reputation
• Consultation : an irritating requirement to include the ordinary members in the decision making process. This involves listening to members' disapproval and concerns before adopting a course of action which has already been decided upon months before