Word: menckenisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...foreword, H. L. Mencken (who as a newspaperman has witnessed nine excutions) says that By the Neck was not planned as a "book of horrors," but to show how men behave in the face of "dreadful doom." He believes his brother's book is the first attempt to bring together "a mass of objective data relating to an important phenomenon of civilization...
...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...