Word: menckenism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pudgy, beer-bibbing Critic Henry Louis Mencken led an outraged charge by members of the "Saturday Night Club" upon two drunks who, loudly denouncing War, tried to crash into the club's meeting in the back room of a Baltimore restaurant. With Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Biologist Raymond Pearl, Conductor Gustav Strube at his heels, Critic Mencken chased the rowdies to the street, collared them, had them jailed overnight. Next day he made them sign a release, crowed: "If they're Communists I don't trust them. They'll go back to Washington and claim they...
...phrases. "However rude or crude" they might be, said Professor Gordon, "they were so expressive, so impudently near the truth, that it was hard to resist them a place in any honest lexicon." U. S. eyes may note examples from Jack London. George Ade, O. Henry, H. L. Mencken, Zane Grey-even so unliterary an exemplar as the late great Baseballer Christy Mathewson ("yellow streak"). In the long list from "aasvogel" to "zooming" some U. S. examples: "Speak-easy" (1889): "Yup. U.S. Variant of yep, yes" (1906); "Razz [short for Razzberry]. Disapproval expressed by hissing or booing directed against...
...Morley "essay" is a peculiar literary form, neither fish, flesh, nor, fowl. It combines a bit of Chesterton with a good deal of Winchell, and now and then a touch of Mencken or Edgar Guest, to make a distinctive type of chatty writing. As a rule, his sketches are neither very amusing nor very dull. His most recent collection. "Internal Revenue", follows the norm, save that less of it is amusing and more of it is dull...
Since the December number of the "American Mercury" is the last issue of the magazine which H. L. Mencken will edit, the most pertinent and interesting feature in this copy, naturally, is his farewell editorial. In it he briefly but gracefully reviews his ten year term as editor, which, on the whole, he seems to have found pleasant enough. His reasons for retiring, he explains, are twofold; first because "ten years is long enough for one editor to serve," and second, because he wants more time to devote to other undertakings, particularly to the composition of more serious books...
...force them out. Mr. Bates remarks that he was handicapped, in his later years, by a delusion of prophecy that made him see himself as the Marx of the American working class, a role for which he was unfitted by temperament and by real inclination. Mr. H. L. Mencken had already remarked a handicap almost as important, the unprecedented style in which Veblen smothered and tortured his thought. Labor manifestoes cannot follow the Latinity of Samuel Johnson and the fugue motives of DeQuincey if they are to capture the hearts and imaginations of coal miners...