Word: menckenisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Veblen Girls. In the '20s Veblen, for all his misfortunes, became the hero of the sort of cult he most disliked. "Veblenism," mocked H. L. Mencken in Smart Set, "was shining in full brilliance. There were Veblenists, Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sorrows of the world. There were even, in Chicago, Veblen Girls-perhaps Gibson Girls grown middle-aged and despairing." But Veblen himself had had enough of public life. Nominated for the presidency of the American Economic Association, he coldly rejected it, remarking: "They didn't offer it to me when I needed...
Absent from the Great Critics sessions was the sage of Baltimore, Critic H. L. Mencken. But over a beer, Mencken peppered the visitors with a shakerful of critical opinions. Sample: "The thing about Theodore Dreiser always was his enormous unintelligence. He reached heights of unintelligence as great as any of the heights of intelligence that Aristotle achieved...
With this fourth & final volume, H. L. Mencken has had his say on the peculiarities of U.S. speech. The final volume, like its predecessors, is a vast miscellany, ill-arranged, bulging at the seams with inconsequential information, festooned with footnotes in such profusion as to give it the appearance of a gigantic hoax. Its elaborate cross references sometimes seem soberly professorial, sometimes like parodies on scholarship. The whole work now runs to 2,880 pages. It is surely one of the great curiosities of literature...
...saved by what Edmund Wilson calls Mencken's genial and acrid relish for the flavor of American life. Even more helpful are the odd anecdotes scattered through it, possessing the sort of owlish, stubborn humor that comes from wringing a subject dry and then wringing it some more. "In late years," says Mencken, "it is me has even got support from eminent statesmen. When, just before Roosevelt II's inauguration day in 1933, the first New Deal martyr, the Hon. Anton J. Cermak, was shot ... he turned to Roosevelt and said, 'I'm glad...
...Mendong Gomba. Typical of Mencken's exhaustive coverage is his account of the U.S. Board on Geographical Names. Organized in the Administration of Benjamin Harrison, it was abolished in 1934 and its functions transferred to the Department of the Interior. "For some time it seems to have escaped the notice of the idealists then fashioning a new world, and so late as 1935 its staff was confined to an executive secretary, an assistant and a clerk. But then its potentialities were grasped by the forward-looking Secretary of the Interior, the Hon. Harold L. Ickes, and after Pearl Harbor...