Word: autodidact
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Harold Ross of The New Yorker said that he was "the most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential-as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have wilted badly. Intended to shock rather than illuminate, the once celebrated epigrams shock no more. The examples quoted, such as, "Love...