Word: menckenism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...brashest, bounciest lexicographer who ever lived is a Baltimorean of German extraction named Henry Louis Mencken. His first, famed dictionary (The American Language, 1919) was dedicated to the proposition that English has now become only a dialect of American...
...AMERICAN LANGUAGE: SUPPLEMENT I-H. L. Mencken-Knopf...
...Author Mencken first intended The American Language: Supplement I to be a small addition to his American Language, soon discovered that his mass of new material had outgrown the parent volume. Many of Supplement I's 739 pages are 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...
...picked by racketeers as front for a movie-ticket racket. He made $50 the first week. But he knew he was headed for the chain gang. He saved his money, stole everything he could lay hands on, pawned it, and fled to Memphis. There he began to read Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and to see the white men around him in a different light...
...Reader Buffum fash himself no more; wherever it came from (authorities disagree),"doughboy" has no money taint. According to H. L. Mencken (The American Language): "Doughboy is an old English Navy term for dumpling ... is said to have originated in the fact that the infantrymen once pipe-clayed parts of their uniforms, with the result that they became covered with a doughy mass when it rained." Alternative version: Civil War cavalrymen coined it as a term of kindly contempt for infantrymen; it referred to the doughnut-shaped brass buttons on their uniforms...