Word: menckenism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They had two children,* wrote and made their living as free-lance journalists and translators. Muñoz contributed to the New Republic, the Nation, the Baltimore Sun and Henry L. Mencken's Smart Set and American Mercury. Of his poetry Muñoz now says: "It stinks...
...first had to go to work. He was a good salesman and in a year he made enough money selling children's swings, and later electric drills, to start himself out at the University of Washington. He had become a serious young man, a reader of H. L. Mencken's green-covered American Mercury-not a radical, merely an earnest explorer of panaceas for the common man. Then father's health began to fail...
...contemporaries who believed that morality could be legislated, he periodically struck out at lesser demons. Dancing, tobacco, Coca-Cola and even football ("neither manly nor Christian") felt his indignant lash. But in 1930, this paragon of virtue, by then long a bishop and according to H. L. Mencken "the most powerful ecclesiastic ever heard of in America," was accused by the elders of his own church of immorality, bucketshop gambling, flour-hoarding (during World War I), adultery, lying and "gross moral turpitude and disregard for the first principles of Christian ethics...
...doctrine of one hardy expert on the burning word, the President had not been daring at all, but unforgivably commonplace and unimaginative. In The American Language, H. L. Mencken complained: "Our maid-of-all-work in [the profanity] department is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah . . . Put the second person pronoun and the adjective old in front of it and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archdeacon...
Congenital Crooks. With H. L. Mencken he deplored the passing of the sturdy old American virtues. He was impressed when an acquaintance remarked, "The real trouble is that the average American is a congenital crook...