Word: menckenisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From behind the thick-lensed glasses that give him a Martian rather than a martial appearance, Military Expert Fletcher Pratt last week shot a pained backward look at the war he had helped to report. Critic H. L. Mencken, who only knew what he read in the papers, had called its war correspondents "a sorry lot" (TIME, Jan. 14). Expert Pratt, a correspondent himself, is convinced that World War II "was very nearly the worst reported war in history." But he turned the blame elsewhere...
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...
...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...