© The Babylon Bee
"If I know Volodymyr like I think I do, he's going to love this," said President Biden as he taped a note reading "Be Mine" on a tank. "Hey, General? Can we get those bombs arrayed into a nice heart shape?"
Sources inside the Pentagon report the military has worked tirelessly over the past weeks to secure ultra-lethal armaments for the Valentine gift. "This surface-to-air missile bouquet is really going to knock his socks off," said Army General Leon Platt. "We've also included surveillance maps of Russian positions, marked with X's and O's. Biden even had the boys program the drones we're sending to spell out 'LOVE' in the sky before shooting their Hellfire missiles. It's really got that personal touch."
The Valentine's present, valued by the Congressional Budget Office at approximately $14 billion, will be given to Ukraine without any oversight as to how the weaponry will be used. "Love doesn't come with strings attached," explained Press Secretary Karine Jeanne-Pierre. "The arsenal is a gift, and will arrive in Kyiv on February 14th alongside a fresh pack of olive-green t-shirts. The Pentagon is still considering whether it is safe to also include a box of chocolate-covered grenades."
In a last-minute addition, the Air Force added a napalm bomb designed to spell out "SWEET PEA" in flames.
satire (n.)c. 1500, "a literary work (originally in verse) intended to ridicule prevailing vice or folly by scornful or contemptuous expression," from French satire (14c.) and directly from Latin satira "satire; poetic medley," earlier satura, in lanx satura "mixed dish, dish filled with various kinds of fruit," literally "full dish," from fem. of satur "sated" (from PIE root *sa- "to satisfy").The word acquired its literary sense, in Latin, in reference to a collection of poems in various meters on a variety of subjects by the late republican poet Ennius. The little that survives of his verse does not now seem particularly satiric, but in classical Latin the word was used especially of a poem which assailed various vices one after another.The form was altered in Latin by influence of Greek satyr, on the mistaken notion that the literary form is related to the Greek satyr drama (see satyr). Also see humor (n.).In modern general use, "a denouncing or deriding speech or writing full of sarcasm, ridicule, irony, etc." (all of which can express satire). The broader meaning "fact or circumstance that makes someone or something look ridiculous" is by 1690s. [Link]
Satire, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are 'endowed by their Creator' with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a sour-spirited knave, and his every victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent. [Ambrose Bierce, "Devil's Dictionary," 1911
satyr (n.)late 14c., satire, "one of a type of woodland deities part human or animal; demigod or spirit of the air or woods, companion of Bacchus," from Old French satire and directly from Latin satyrus, from Greek satyros, a word of unknown origin. "The etymology of [satyros] is unknown. A number of hypotheses have been proposed, but none of them makes sense ..." [Beekes].In pre-Roman Greek art, a man-like being with the tail and ears of a horse; the conception of a being part man part goat is due to Roman sculptors, who seem to have assimilated them to the fauns of native mythology. In some English bibles the word is used curiously to translate Hebrew se'irim, a type of hairy monster superstitiously believed to inhabit deserts.In Middle English the word could mean also a kind of ape supposed to live in Africa or Arabia (late 14c.), after a use of Greek satyros, and the name was later applied by zoologists to the orangutan (1690s). From 1781 as "very lecherous or lascivious person." Related: Satyress.
SATYR, n. One of the few characters of the Grecian mythology accorded recognition in the Hebrew . (Leviticus, xvii, 7.) The satyr was at first a member of the dissolute community acknowledging a loose allegiance with Dionysius, but underwent many transformations and improvements. Not infrequently he is confounded with the faun, a later and decenter creation of the Romans, who was less like a man and more like a goat.
The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce [Link]