Word: menckenism
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Snorted Baltimore's bellicose H. L. Mencken (The American Language): "I think they ought to charge us for it, but all to the Bostonians. They are the only ones who speak the English language in America. The rest of us speak American...
...muggs, legmen and copy-deskers alike, soon made Variety the richest word-coining mint of the century, to the bafflement of laymen and the delight of language fans like H. L. Mencken and G. B. Shaw. Some of its headlines (such as its 1929 crash flash, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG, and its STIX Nix Hix Fix, when bucolic cinemas' flopped in the hinterland) have attained a kind of backstage immortality. So have flopperoo, push over, palooka, scram, to click; and such trade phrases as "boff" (a variation of sock or punch) for smash hit, "preem," as a verb...
...World War II, as many a newsman proudly boasts, the best reported war in history? No, said crabby, square-rigged Henry Louis Mencken with characteristic sourness. In the opinion of Baltimore's aging (65) iconoclast, an old-newspaperman himself. World War II was covered wordily but not well...
...correspondents, said Mencken, were "a sorry lot, either typewriter-statesmen turning out dope stuff drearily dreamed up. or sentimental human-interest scribblers turning out maudlin stuff about the common soldier, easy to get by the censors. Ernie Pyle was a good example. He did well what he set out to do, but that couldn't be called factual reporting...
Said Old Reporter Mencken, who for four years has read his Sunpapers (he is still on the board of directors) but not written for them: "The Battle of the Bulge hasn't been reported accurately even yet. I don't even know yet what generals got licked...