Word: menckenisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mencken, who cares for nobody, except for the laughs, the whole race looked satisfactorily scandalous. He described President Truman as a "shabby mountebank," Tom Dewey as a "limber trimmer," announced that Henry Wallace had manifestly lost "what little sense he had formerly, if indeed, he ever had any at all." He grudgingly admitted that Socialist Norman Thomas seemed to have some brains, but wrote him off immediately. He thought Dixiecrat J. Strom Thurmond was "the best of all the candidates," but with a final growl, he warned that "all the worst morons in the South...
Burges Johnson is dissatisfied with American profanity and hopes for an enrichment of all its forms: the oath denunciatory, the oath asseverative, the oath interjectional, the malediction. His argument is a little too mechanically playful, but it is well illustrated and has some grains of sense. Henry L. Mencken (The American Language) contributes an approving foreword, remarking, among other things, that...
...little of it got beyond a few four-letter words . . ." This complaint, in which Burges Johnson concurs, would be perfectly sound if cursing were entirely a verbal matter, but it is not. Its effect is proportionate to the kidney of the curser. The four-letter banalities that bore Mr. Mencken might suffice to turn him pale when uttered in foulness of spirit. Likewise, the most horrible oaths in the language can sound like pink tea if pronounced in a sterile tone. Professor Johnson does not go into the profundities of profanity. Treating it as a branch of literature...
...Were the innocent being smeared along with the guilty? It was a cry that had gone up during almost every congressional investigation. It had sounded with particular force during the House hearings on Communism in Hollywood (TIME, Nov. 10, 1947). But, wrote Baltimore's crusty old H. L. Mencken (who had himself been accused of Communism after World War I): "The number of such cases has been greatly overestimated by the bogus 'liberals' who are always so ready to slide down the pole when Reds sound the alarm...
...Mencken," said Wallace ingratiatingly, "is nobody's stooge...