Word: menckenism
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...NECK-August Mencken-Hastings House...
...things delight the Brothers Mencken more than a broken neck. Henry L. has been breaking them, as a critic for years. Now his younger bachelor brother, August, a Baltimore civil engineer, has taken time out to collect this anthology of descriptions (from contemporary sources) of 100 more or less sensational hangings...
...Engineer Mencken begins with Arthur Gooch, hanged in 1936 for violation of the Lindbergh kidnapping law, and works back along the rope to the Haymarket anarchists; to Charles Julius Guiteau, who shot President Garfield; to the Molly Maguires, the Irish miners who terrorized the Pennsylvania coal fields; to John Wilkes Booth's accomplices, including Mary Surratt, first woman ever hanged in the U.S. He also includes British body-snatcher William Burke, who added a wrinkle to the illicit business of selling bodies for medical dissection by creating his own corpses, and added a verb to the English language...
...long may it wave." He will discover, if he did not know it, that "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is not from the Bible but is a folk improvement on it dating from about A.D. 1,000. He will be glad to see that Editor Mencken enshrines his file-tongued old friend James Huneker ("He died without owing me a cent"); that he respects the gentle excellence of the late Justice Brandeis' dissenting opinions; that he is not afraid to rescue Elbert Hubbard from the Roycrofters (with, for instance, his definition of God as "The John...
...modestly, are any attributed phrases by one of the liveliest of living coiners, Henry Louis Mencken. "I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself. I leave that to the intelligence of posterity...