Word: boobus
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...group of enterprising shills and snake-oil salesmen get together to peddle their wares? This expo was a holistic sort of con game, where remedies were pitched to the self-absorbed, eager but aging yuppies forever seeking longevity. I'm sure H.L. Mencken would agree that the species Boobus Americanus still flourishes. MICHAEL N. CANTWELL Tampa...
...nation itself. Our more perfect union was forged at a convention (Philadelphia, 1787), divided against itself at another (Montgomery, Ala., 1861), reunited at a rather intimate one (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865) and renewed quadriennially. Long before Sinclair Lewis chronicled the fictional convention high jinks of George F. Babbitt, boobus Americanus and prototypical conventioneer, other observers dis covered our penchant for gatherings. "As soon as several Americans have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite," observed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Editorialized the Nation...
...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...
...professional 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...
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...