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...AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Fourth Edition, Corrected, Enlarged and Rewritten- H. L. Mencken-Knopf...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Whose Language? | 5/11/1936 | See Source »

Henry Louis Mencken has filled some 15 books and countless heads with his brilliant palaver. The Billiken-god of a generation that read his Smart Set like so many monthly revelations, he emancipated many a corn-fed adolescent. Mencken was an iconoclastic prophet but not an indignant one. "As an American," he said once, "I naturally spend most of my time laugh-ing." And his brilliance, like that of his fellow-iconoclast, Bernard Shaw, has not always done him justice. Some of his trumpetings have merely deafened the ears they assaulted, some of his more winning piccolo-and-bassoon effects...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Whose Language? | 5/11/1936 | See Source »

...Mencken first wrote The American Language it was a modest (for him) book of 374 pages. Since then he has twice revised it, finally re-written it to its present size of 769 pages. Even his old enemies will find it a respectable achievement...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Whose Language? | 5/11/1936 | See Source »

Whether or not that milestone stands at a parting of the ways, not even scholars can tell with certainty. Mencken himself, modestly disclaiming any clairvoyance on the subject, sticks stoutly to his factual report on what the American language has been and now is, but thinks American the coming tongue. Calling himself a lay brother, "surely no philologian," he intimates that his book is but a temporary signpost, serving its turn until the completion of such monuments-in-progress as Sir William Craigie's Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (begun in 1926 at the University of Chicago...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Whose Language? | 5/11/1936 | See Source »

...Future of American. According to Mencken, the sky's the limit. He points out the dominant position of the English language today: in what he calls conservative figures, 174,000,000 people speak it as their native tongue and another 17,000,000 speak it besides their own. Nearest world-competitor is Spanish, with a little more than half as many. And "no other language is spreading so fast or into such remote areas." English looks like the lingua franca of the future, but probably not in its present form. What will it look like? Says Mencken...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Whose Language? | 5/11/1936 | See Source »

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