Word: mencken
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...President Roosevelt tried to force simplified spelling down the throat of the Congressional Record. Esperanto was tortured to death with fiendish glee by the barbed criticisms of philologists. And yet Mr. Eurique Blanco, writing in the international Book Review, has tempted the lightning of such a champion as Mr. Mencken by declaring that English is not "easy to learn" and that before if can become a world language its innate perversity must be destroyed...
MANY MINDS-Carl Van Doren-Knopf ($2.50). In this new volume of critical essays, Mr. Van Doren again applies a skilful scalpel to his literary contemporaries. The very titles of the chapters are a triumph: Smartness and Light, for H. L. Mencken; Youth and Wings, for Edna St. Vincent Millay; Flame and Slag, for Carl Sandburg; Beyond Grammar, for Ring Lardner. He covers the field of philosophers, poets, wits, essayists. His estimates are tempered with sympathy, humor, real understanding. He praises and blames ; weighs faults against virtues. One reads on absorbedly for some time before one becomes subtly conscious that...
After Mr. H. L. Mencken and G.B.S. have explained carefully and occasionally in words of one syllable exactly how great is the triumph of the bachelor, the discovery of one who believes that single blessedness is due to the inability of the man to win a mate is a distinct shock. The suggestion of match making instruction at a male college in the light of modern knowledge is "refreshingly naive" even as such a suggestion for a female college would be incredibly ridiculous. The indomitable ninety-seven deserve to be Chronicled in song and story as "Harvard...
...left untouched the fertile field of American literature, for he would have found there much to cheer him. F. P. A., to take only one, is known for his callousness toward the seductive charms of feminine inexperience; and it is the off-expressed opinion of Mr. H. I., Mencken that although it is theoretically possible for woman to possess real beauty, from an aesthetic point of view, she so rarely does that she is forced to rely, on the alternative attractions of intellect and understanding. Moreover, the writers of popular songs whose favorite theme is going home to Mother...
...course, like the old discussion of the hen and the egg, it might be debated whether the American comic moulded American life or American life expressed itself through the comic. Actually, however, the comic has developed into an organ of social satire, an ogre which sees, as Mencken says of women, "with bright and horrible eyes" all of the weaknesses and vices of men and broadcasts this knowledge to the world. The "funnies" are terribly realistic, destructive, usually pessimistic criticisms of everything although the most popular subjects are domestic life, business and personal adventure. But the delight of ridiculing...