Word: menckenisms
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...last week's issue of The New Yorker, Lexicographer H. L. Mencken* took a long look at the developing language of television. Like other barbaric dialects, Mencken found, it includes many borrowings from earlier cultures (theater, movies, radio); and TV's own coinages, as reported by Variety and assorted philologers, seemed to consist largely of the obvious, like ike for iconoscope. Other samples of current video verbiage given by Mencken...
...Mencken noted the industrywide confusion concerning a name for TV fans. He was unimpressed by televiewer, viewer, looker and looker-in. Mencken's contribution: "I suggest trying gawk...
...same rather soggy prose, or because the editors have pressed the essays into one stylistic mold, most of them read as if written by one man: a learned but conventional professor. (One happy exception: the chapter on "American Language," in which the gay, strong hand of H. L. Mencken quickly shows itself.) What a reader misses here is what he finds in Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought: one mind in command of a subject, sometimes pulling a boner but more often arousing excitement and curiosity, and always leaving on the reader the sharp stamp...
...read your review of The Lost Art of Profanity [TIME, Sept. 27] with a sensation of pain and disappointment. Was it not enough that the devil should get in his lick with the author? Must the satanic literary abnormalities of Burges Johnson and Henry Mencken be flaunted by TIME? . . . PAULINE B. WHITE Lancaster...
...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...