Word: menckenian
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...devoted simply to supporting the thesis of The American Language, i.e., U.S. speech-ways have grown so powerful that they are rapidly reducing to a dialect "the ancient and lovely but now somewhat rheumy language of the British Isles." Readers of the Supplement will find it packed with boisterous Menckenian humor and casual erudition...
...Depression -e.g., forgotten man, economic royalist, horse-and-buggy days, boondoggling-as are the more ephemeral third-termite and That Man, and the alphabet soup of government bureaus (NRA, TVA). But the bulk of heavy coinage has come from a slew of irresponsible, word-happy inventors, including such Menckenian heroes as Variety's late Jack Conway (who coined baloney, S.A., high-hat, pushover, payoff, bellylaugh, palooka and scram) and the inventor of slanguage itself, Walter Winchell...
...infinite discretion, and a fine understanding of psychology as she blows in the lower IQ brackets." But the necessities of an extended argument weigh heavily on Paragrapher Mencken's pen; much of the fire has gone out of his bluster. Treatise on Right & Wrong is written tiredly, its Menckenian tricksiness a little dingy from much wear. Carelessness sometimes trips him into such howlers as this: "Nero, as Tacitus tells us, illuminated his gardens at night by clothing them in shirts impregnated with pitch and then setting fire to them...
...conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." These two more or less general and philosophical ideas are tied down by the able Mr. Leach, and are constrained most convincingly to apply to the needs and trends of the moments. Essentially, the argument involves the Menckenian attack on the "joiner," but it employs this jeremiad in a gentler, more discursive, and more appealing way; it is a bit of comment apt and in good taste...
...Liberalism had turned reactionary in the War- time fever, and The New Republic lost 40% of its 48,000 circulation. After the War it faced a nation whose tempo had suddenly, nervously quickened, whose major thought tendencies, expressed in journalism, philosophy and literature, were toward the satire, horselaugh and Menckenian sneer, hardly sympathetic to the earnest, didactic, creative attitude of The New Republic. Dismayed by the scene around him, Editor Croly's faiths subtly changed; his belief in progressive movements weakened, he began to feel that in individual development lay the real future of Liberalism. With the collapse...