Word: menckenism
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Condescension informs much of the literature about Los Angeles, or something darker (The Day of the Locust). It seems to beget in the outsider the tendency to be snide, to say, for example, that if Houston is the buckle on the Sunbelt, L.A. is the melanoma. "Double Dubuque," H.L. Mencken called it. Westbrook Pegler proposed that the city be declared incompetent and placed in the charge of a guardian...
...Chesapeake has always attracted superlatives. Captain John Smith, who first entered the bay in 1608, was so taken with the "fruitful and delightsome" place that he declared, "Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation." H.L. Mencken, Baltimore's celebrated sage, was so impressed by the bay's rich marine life that he labeled it "an immense protein factory...
Author Sinclair Lewis, whose position as National Champion Castigator is challenged only by his fellow idealist, Critic Henry Louis Mencken, has made another large round-up of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures-of fiction-which, like an infuriated swineherd, he can beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition. The new collection closely resembles the herd obtained on the Castigator's last foray, against the medical profession (Arrowsmith, 1925) and a parallel course is run, from upcreek tabernacles, through a hayseed college and seminary to a big-city...
...telling you all these things about myself not because I think you care about my problems, but it might interest you to translate them into terms of your own." If the author's gifts for home truth and Establishment-deflation are not in the same league with H.L. Mencken's attacks on American foibles, they are comfortable and well-worn. Rooney's humor is like that pair of old loafers one could not bear to throw away: just right for puttering around the house on Sunday. -By J.D. Reed
...distrust the federal judiciary. The amendment has definite appeal to be sure; while it would not make it impossible for Congress to keep on spending more than it takes in, it would at least help to curtail profligacy. But the amendment also raises enough questions to recall H.L. Mencken's aphorism: for every complex problem there is a solution that is "simple, neat and wrong." -George J. Church Reported by Evan Thomas/Washington