Word: duddyism
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Some solid achievements remain, of course. The American Language (and its supplements) has justly become a classic. Mencken's lively journalistic talents invigorated a generation of practitioners. The American Mercury waged brisk verbal war against Bostonian cultural fuddy-duddyism. The green cover of the Mercury, in fact, was once the badge of the campus intellectual. The views expressed seem far from revolutionary today, but they are more trenchant and readable than Marcuse or Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung...
...himself has been something of an upstream swimmer against the intellectual current prevailing at the seminary during the past two decades. These have been the "neo-orthodox" years of theological through-the-looking-glass, when the wildest radicals were the most Biblically conservative, and the mark of old fuddy-duddyism was a relaxed attitude toward dogma. Students jampack the classes of Reinhold Niebuhr to hear that man is not good and never will be, and that humans must be content to strive for conditional and imperfect ends...
Observing that U. S. colleges suffered not from competition but from fuddy-duddyism, Dr. Johnson and a committee colleague, Dr. Frank Aydelotte, assured them that U. S. scholars would not be displaced, asked that special professorships be created for eminent refugees. Said Dr. Johnson: "For the next generation the natural home of scholarship and science must be America...
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