Word: menckenisms
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WAIF & SAFE. H. L. Mencken called attention to the native U.S. talent for "reducing complex concepts to starkest abbreviations." From O.K. to K.O., Americans have long coined initial-born words. But what began as playful sport has turned into contagion and verbal smog (smoke and fog). Just to describe the new rash of alphabetease, linguists were forced to invent a new word: acronym (from the Greek akros for tip, onyma for name), which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then...
Hell hath no fury like an ex-disciple. Novelist and Editor Charles Angoff was sole editorial assistant to H. L. Mencken from 1925 to 1933. In recent years Russian-born, Harvard-educated Angoff has emerged as Mencken's chief literary assassin. Having fanged his ex-idol non-fictionally in H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory, Angoff releases some fictional venom in The Bitter Spring. Mencken is portrayed as a loud-mouthed vulgarian and an intellectual fraud with but a single saving grace, his love of music...
...David Polonsky (obviously Angoff), a breathless and bewildered Boswell already a trifle disillusioned in his Johnson. Polonsky's trouble seems to be that he has come to the American World seeking a 20th century messiah and found only a man with a man's common frailties. Nonetheless, Mencken, as the villainous Brandt, commandeers The Bitter Spring and breathes into it the only life it has. While much of Brandt's talk is unfit for print, it alone bears repeating. The slashing Mencken tone is nostalgically familiar in such comments as: "All the Spaniards have contributed...
...itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan...
...never the editor-in-chief of the Akron, Ohio, Gazette, nor have I written articles for Commentary, Encounter, or the Sewance Review. I was never selected Managing Editor of the Week, nor invited to be Publisher of the Congressional Record For a Day. I was never H.L. Mencken's copy boy, never a courageous war correspondent, and I was not there the day the bomb fell...