It was during a train ride between Bombay and Poone, way back in 1959, that I heard that stylish actor -- and brilliant conversationalist -- the late Harold Lang, saying that "a bride is a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her."

Later on, I asked him if he had just made it up. "Nooooo…" he said and grinned, "It was probably Dorothy Parker, or Woolcott, I’m not sure".

And so, when I used this expression in a conversation I always prefaced it by saying, "As Dorothy Parker said…"

Imagine my surprise when I learned that this was a definition written by Ambrose Bierce in his The Devil’s Dictionary which was presented to me last week.

Flicking through it, I came across some delightful one-liners: "Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage. A lawyer is one skilled in circumvention of the law". (Quoting them at dinner parties would earn you a lot of brownie points). But it isn’t just a collection of cynical and misogynous remarks: The Dictionary is one of the most provocative studies of human mind -- and human nature. To give you an example of Bierce’s sharp, sardonic humour, this is how he defines ‘Logic’:

"LOGIC, n: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basis of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion -- thus:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.

Minor Premise: one man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; therefore -

Conclusion: sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.

This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed".

In the literary annals of North America, Ambrose Bierce was a mystery man. He did not go to a university; he went to a school where he was unhappy. Untutored and unschooled, he gained a huge reputation as a major creative writer. He was even dubbed as the American Oscar Wilde. At the height of his fame he disappeared into thin air.

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He was born in 1842, the tenth child of Marcus Bierce, a devout Congregationalist who had a fixation about the letter A, and had decided that each child’s name should  begin with an A -- Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert -- and then Ambrose.

Marcus Bierce was a strict and stringent individual; Ambrose’s mother was much too preoccupied with mourning the successive deaths of his brother and sisters. She did not give Ambrose the love he needed. Ambrose took to books in his father’s library which was the largest in the county. At the age of 15, the loveless Ambrose not only left school, but home as well.

He found a job in a nearby town as an apprentice to a printer in a newspaper. At the age of 17, he went to a military academy but dropped out after a year and drifted through several jobs until the Civil War broke out and he enlisted in Lincoln’s army.

As a soldier, Ambrose Bierce witnessed nightmarish butchery which horrified him for the rest of his life. After his demobilisation he was posted in the deep South as a Federal Treasury agent and was appalled to see carpetbaggers who had moved in to loot the South. Soldiers and generals were all in league with unscrupulous businessmen and outright pirates who used all kinds of underhand methods to impound commodities which belonged to the US government. His idealism was shaken.

It was the Civil War that gave Ambrose Bierce the cynical view of human nature, a cynicism, which is palpable in his magnum opus, The Devil’s Dictionary.

He resigned from the army and went to the booming city of San Francisco where he was jobless for some time. He now laboured on his self-education. The writer who impressed him the most was Edward Gibbon. He read The Decline and the Fall of Roman Empire in its entirety. He drank it up. Gibbon’s ironic explorations of hypocrisy and corruption in the early Christian Church and his description of how virtuous rulers were succeeded by vicious tyrants alienated him from the sanctimonious piety of the evangelists of his own time. Gibbon changed Ambrose Bierce into Bitter Bierce.

He now began to write poetry but realised soon that he would never be up with the best and so gave it up, turning his attention to short stories and articles which were published in various newspaper and magazines. He joined the staff of a newspaper and rose to become its editor within a few months. He wrote countless short stories but never a novel because, as he says in his Dictionary, "a novel is a short story padded". He had already begun to work on his dictionary and some bits of it were included in his articles which intrigued his readers no end.

After living for 30 years in San Francisco he suddenly moved to Washington. He continued to work on his Dictionary for another five years. It was completed in 1911.

Publishers hesitated from publishing it because of the title, but finally the work that took Bierce 35 years to write, was printed. By now, his reputation as a misanthrope and a misogynist had spread far and wide, but he was also acknowledged as the literary scribe of America.

All of a sudden in 1913, the Dr Johnson of San Francisco decided to travel to Mexico to witness the revolution in progress. He wrote a letter from Mexico and that was the last anyone ever heard of him. Ambrose Bierce, the scourge of political corruption and all forms of hypocrisy, vanished from the face of the earth. Research into his disappearance launched by the American government yielded no results.

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And now let me share with you one of Bierce’s captivating definitions.

"J: is a consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel - than which nothing could be more absurd. Its original form, which has been but slightly modified, was that of a tail of a subdued dog, and it was not a letter but a character, standing for the Latin verb, jacere, ‘to throw’ because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog’s tail assumes that shape. This is the origin of the letter, as expounded by the renowned Dr Joculpus Burner of the University of Belgrade, who established his conclusion on the subject in a work of three quarto volumes and committed suicide on being reminded that the j in the Roman alphabet had originally no curl."