Word: menckenism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Henry L Mencken, 65, lord high lambaster of the '20s, had a visit from Columnist Ward Morehouse and impersonated his old self. Nostalgic excerpts from the interview: "People are in a state of imbecility. The country is a wreck. . . . The United Nations has no more chance than the Ku Klux Klan would have in the Vatican...
...greatest pedants going, shot up. It was, said the New York Times stiffly, a "remarkable sentence." But college professors, quickly appealed to, proved as disappointing as Balaam. To a man, they put their O.K. on Churchill's grammar-defying "This is me" (a usage that H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, has already admitted to "conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of English"). Said Yale's Robert D. French: men like Churchill make the English language. Seconded Princeton's Gordon H. Gerould: idiomatic English is good speech, prissy English is not. Said Columbia...
...World Publishing Co. has issued a "Memorial Edition" of An American Tragedy, with an introduction by H. L. Mencken; will reissue all Dreiser's novels within the year...
...first things he would learn would be the shrewd formula by which promotion-wise Larry Spivak has lifted the Mercury to 95,000 circulation, from the 33,000 to which it had sunk when Editor H. L. Mencken wearily stepped out in 1933. It had long since lost all the sudsy sarcasm it had under Mencken, was now an excitable cross between Reader's Digest and an exposé sheet. The Spivak formula: find a man with a promising cause, and exploit them both. Sample "discoveries...
...Henry L. Mencken appealed to a Baltimore court to restore to him his fireside social life, nocturnal rest, capacity to concentrate on his work, and general peace of mind-all gone now, said he. The thief of his serenity, deposed the editor-critic-raconteur-philologist's petition, was a dog next door who passed his life barking-a "large, powerful male dog of breed or breeds unknown to your orator." The barking, pursued Mencken, was "abnormally and extraordinarily loud, harsh, penetrating, violent, unpleasant, and distracting." He prayed that the court would compel his neighbor to take dog and bark...