Word: menckenisms
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...What H.L. Mencken once said regarding vaudeville applies, I think, equally well to country music-there are those who like it and those who can stand it when they are drunk...
...underestimates the American public will never go broke!" cried "Professor" Irwin Corey, paraphrasing H.L. Mencken to a dazed National Book Awards' audience in Manhattan. Standing in for Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1973 fiction prize with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, Comedian Corey confused the assembled authors, critics and publishers with a frenetic routine, prompting some to think that he was really the reclusive Pynchon himself. Others believed that his performance was a clever parody of Pynchon's tortuous style. The ceremonies were...
From the start, Rhine was criticized for juggling numbers. (Subsequent researchers have also used questionable procedures, citing "negative ESP" when the number of correct guesses fall below average and "displacement" when subjects call the card before or after the one they are trying to guess.) H.L. Mencken summarized the early views of the dubious when he wrote, "In plain language, Professor Rhine segregates all those persons who, in guessing the cards, enjoy noteworthy runs of luck, and then adduces those noteworthy runs of luck as proof that they must possess mysterious powers." Rhine tightened his laboratory conditions in the 1930s...
...Frazier, who went on from his lace-curtain upbringing to acquire a Harvard degree and Brahmin persona, views himself as a romantic in mourning for his era's lost grace and style. The common man (H.L. Mencken's Boobus americanus) is to Frazier the root of the new Philistinism-"ignorant, ill-clad, ill-spoken...
Have effete Eastern intellectuals underestimated this whoop-it-up Westerner who often behaved, as his biographer admits, like "the illegitimate offspring of H.L. Mencken and Annie Oakley"? Wallace Stegner, novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain), Stanford professor, and a fellow native of Utah, concedes that DeVoto was often wrong as well as "spectacularly right." He was also an 'Implacable showoff" who "set world records for taking himself seriously." But yes, says Stegner, DeVoto has been low-rated, chiefly because he ran with no coterie, and in fact ran head down against most of the opinion makers...