Word: menckenism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With this quotation from H. L. Mencken, Boston's peppery Porter Sargent in the 28th annual edition of his Handbook of Private Schools sums up his opinion of what U.S. education most needs...
...Mencken, happy over the soldier-sailor fan mail that followed pocket-size reprinting of his autobiographical Happy Days and Heathen Days, exuberated with an old-fashioned Mencken slambang: "That is the difference between a soldier and a civilian. The letters you get from civilians come from those who don't like your books...
...After a long struggle, TIME confesses that Reader Cooke is probably correct. But neither the New York Public Library, nor H. L. Mencken, nor the Hartford Courant can produce the editorial in which Editor Warner allegedly made the quip...
...connected with a reluctance to include unprintable language, for the great U.S. contributions to invective and bawdry are gravely slighted. The DAE's scholarly scope is enormous, and Editor Craigie recognizes the role of plain people in making speech. But in many vital respects Henry Louis Mencken, now at work on his fifth edition of The American Language, can still show the way to the professors...
...quality that makes it of contemporary value is its reminder of the distance U.S. intellectuals have traveled since Sinclair Lewis' first works: between Main Street and Mainstream there is the difference between an indictment for murder and the studying of a will. Where the plain American appeared to Mencken and Lewis-and to Author Basso in his early works-as a power well-nigh malignant in his complacency, John Applegate now emerges as the first guardian of the virtues that should be preserved. In Mainstream Author Basso goes farther than anyone: the plain American is also an intellectual whose...