Word: menckens
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...pleasures of homosexuals, and called for a legal curb on human breeding. He has castigated America as "the land of the dull and the home of the literal" and repeatedly predicted the "smashup" of the "last empire on earth." Like many a gadfly before him, from Twain to Mencken, Vidal has won fame and wealth by biting the land that feeds...
...truth seeker is Tom Burnam, an English professor at Portland State University in Oregon, and his compendium is the best antidote to nonsense since H.L. Mencken hung up his spites. "I believe," says Burnam in his introduction to The Dictionary of Misinformation, "that when we fall it's not because our reasoning faculties have tripped us; it's because of the things we know that just aren...
...Dictionary of Misinformation is in the tradition of Mencken's American Credo, a mocking collage of secular gospel. Examples...
...charm. The defenders of lucid prose shuddered at the mangled sentences--the pronouns without antecedents, the flabby modifiers, the split infinitives, the undue use of the passive voice, the malevolent creeping of coarse phraseology. A nation stood appalled that the language of Jefferson, of Webster, of Emerson, Melville, and Mencken could be contorted into such a mockery of America's verbal heritage...
...Brooklyn have been bunking into friends over on Toidy-Toid or Eighty-Foist streets or udder pernts around the place. Whether they ogled da goils, hersted da flag or simply berled in the noonday sun, they absolutely moidered the King's English. The "vulgar speech" that H.L. Mencken denounced in The American Language was long the despair of philologists, as well as a rich source of argot and gag lines for stand-up comics. But now Brooklynese seems to have just about gone the way of dem Bums, as the old Brooklyn Dodgers were known...