Word: menckens
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...literature either written in their tongue or translated into it. But if not already a "dead" language, Esperanto is at least a static one, for its adherents have refused to change it since 1880 when it was launched by its inventor, Dr. Lazarus Zamenhof of Poland. Says Henry Louis Mencken in The American Language: "The trouble with all the 'universal' languages is that the juices of life are simply not in them. They are the creations of scholars drowning in murky oceans of dead prefixes and suffixes, and so they fail to meet the needs of a highly...
...AMERICAN LANGUAGE - H. L. Mencken-Knopf...
...Mencken last week declared that "the greatest story since the Resurrection" is the now living drama of Edward VIII. It cannot be staged in Britain as a play, although George Bernard Shaw hastily wrote last week for William Randolph Hearst a strongly pro-Mrs. Simpson and pro-Edward VIII playlet in which he flung at Prime Minister Baldwin the ultimate Irish insult of tagging him "Prime Minister Goldwyn." But the drama the world wanted to see, Edvardus Rex, was acting and writing itself hour by hour as the amazing facts erupted. They formed not a stately royal play such...
Etymologists have long recognized the difference between U. S. and British English, but it was a layman, Henry Louis Mencken (The American Language), who first popularized the idea that U. S. citizens speak a tongue of their own. Eleven years ago the University of Chicago asked slight, bearded Professor Sir William Alexander Craigie, since 1901 co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to collect in definitive form the words that have meanings and currency peculiar to the U. S. Last week in Chicago appeared the first section, A-to-Baggage, of his long-awaited Dictionary of American English on Historical...
...from Latin about 1696, and in 1882 Doglover Albert Payson Terhune's mother, Essayist "Marion Harland," first used alumnae. Politics produced Abolitionist, anti-liquor, anti-saloon, anti-imperialist. From the Southwestern border filtered Spanish words like adobe, alfalfa, arroyo. Also listed as Spanish in origin, on H. L. Mencken's authority, is the U. S. poker term ante...