Word: mencken
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...serious reality, not only in backward places like Mexico and Iran but also in the U.S. Polls show that 90% of Americans believe in God and pray often, but most of the serious observations about this country are made by the other 10%. Nothing has changed since H.L. Mencken in the way that public commentators look at the reality of religious life...
When he was eleven, the tribe moved to an apartment just off Baltimore's Union Square, where that famous curmudgeon H.L. Mencken lived. The future "Observer" satirist was unaware of that, though today he suspects that Mencken was the elderly gentleman who one day called the cops to chase Baker and some fellow ballplayers out of the square. In high school, young Russell was well liked, athletic (he ran the quarter mile) and showed promise as a humorist with a senior-year essay...
DIED. Charles Angoff, 77, novelist, critic, educator and sole editorial associate of H.L. Mencken on the sassy literary monthly American Mercury; of cancer; in New York City. In 1925 Russian-born Angoff was chosen by Mencken over 61 applicants to assist him at the newborn Mercury. Angoff stayed on for 25 years, becoming, in Mencken's view, "the best managing editor in America." Angoff later published eleven novels about Jewish-American life, as recounted by a fictional alter ego named David Polonsky. In one of them Angoff savages a Mencken-esque "literary dictator of America," portraying...
Given the new realities, those statistics could change without notice. The People's Republic may soon be complaining of U.S. neologisms, coinages, and other abuses. Like Americans, the Chinese can take comfort in H.L. Mencken's editorial, as valid today as it was 40 years ago: "As English spreads over the world, will it be able to maintain its present form? Probably not. But why should it? ... Stability in language is synonymous with rigormortis." In 1978, American prose continued to alter, irritate and entertain. To the purist, those characteristics may be evidence of deterioration. Certainly our language...
What we miss for this part of the great plebiscite is the services of H.L. Mencken to write about the Carnival of Buncombe, to lay about him in good humor over the "rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels" who pump "stale bilge" around this "lugubrious ball." But even a man of such laser eye as Mencken confessed that after damning politicians uphill and downdale for years, a certain faith in the process kept re-emerging and he looked to politicians "to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest." That is a tall order, but one suspects that we will...