Word: americanus
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...Frazier, who went on from his lace-curtain upbringing to acquire a Harvard degree and Brahmin persona, views himself as a romantic in mourning for his era's lost grace and style. The common man (H.L. Mencken's Boobus americanus) is to Frazier the root of the new Philistinism-"ignorant, ill-clad, ill-spoken...
...colleagues, Vandervoort believes that most doctors are likely to be baffled when women patients set their sights on them as men rather than as physicians. But his judgment of those who succumb to blandishments is harsh. He assigns them to a medical subspecies of H.L. Mencken's Boobus americanus. To the degree that a doctor surrenders to the fantasy of being irresistible, he becomes ineffective as a physician...
Slogans Sell. At 33, the gaunt, olive-skinned attorney (Harvard Law, '58) is a new kind of lobbyist on the Washington legislative scene. As chief caveat caller to Emptor Americanus, he has no constituency but the American consumer, no financial backing beyond what he can generate from lectures and writing (his auto-safety book, Unsafe at Any Speed, sold 450,000 hard-cover and paperback copies, earned him $55,000). Nader's success is largely due to his unerring flair for phrasemaking, backed by diligent research. A self-taught speed reader, he flips through thousands of pages...
...heartland of America been the physiocratic demi-Eden of American myth, the pastoral paradise hymned by Jefferson and Thoreau, limned by Eakins and Wyeth. The ganglia of history's richest nation lie today in the inchoate, intermeshed agglomerations of city, suburb and country that have become Megalopolis americanus. Such is its present rate of growth that by century's end, one concrete conurbation will reach from Portland, Me., to Norfolk, Va., in the East, another from the Mexican border to San Francisco in the West...
Revealing List. Mencken strikes the same strident tone in the 400 letters culled by Editor Forgue from his massive correspondence of 15,000. "Of my inventions," he once wrote, "I am vainest of Bible Belt, booboisie, smuthound and Boobus americanus." The list is revealing. It bears the date and the outdatedness of the '20s, along with such storied fossils as bathtub gin, the Black Bottom and the Stutz Bearcat. The fate of a successful iconoclast is to be buried with the icons he smashed...