Word: wittingly
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...rootless. "Old American things are old as nothing else anywhere in the world is old, old without majesty, old without mellowness, old without pathos, just shabby and bloodless and worn out. . . . Something infinitely old and disillusioned peers out between the rays of George Ade's wit, and Mrs. Wharton's intellectuality positively freezes the fingers with which one turns her page. . . . Think of the arctic frigidity of Mr. Paul Elmer More's criticism...
...will enjoy the many anecdotes she tells (too lengthy for quotation) of the Master's circuitous crotchets. She met "everybody," seems to have liked them all except George Moore, whose malicious conversation she describes as "a torrent of venom. It was the tone of The Dunclad without its wit." Though France is Edith Wharton's second home (she has lived there since 1907), most of her 42 books have been concerned with the U. S. scene. She does not admit which literary child is her favorite, but says she is "bored and even exasperated'' when told...
...Shreveport, La. last week, a slack-jawed half-wit called Fred Lockhart, 38, confessed that he had lured Mae Griffin, 15, into the nearby woods. There Lockhart, an itinerant maker and seller of artificial butterflies for home decoration, stabbed Mae Griffin in the side when she resisted his advances, raped her while she was dying. As soon as the story got around Shreveport, a mob of 5,000 rushed the Caddo parish courthouse where Lockhart was held. Two young women shrieked that the mob was "yellow" if it did not "go in and get him." It took four hours...
...comparative outline of human ethics; as before. Author Mencken is constantly distracted by the red herring of the Christian Churches. "All the branches of Christianity suffer by the fact that they seem to be unable to take in the greatest contribution of the modern world to ethical theory, to wit, the concept of a moral obligation to be intelligent. . . . Its moral system remains an easy and grateful refuge for the weak and the sick, the stupid and the misinformed, the confiding and the irresolute, but there is little in it to attract men and women who are intelligent and enterprising...
...Harlem on Parade" I liked; among other things it demonstrates that the miscegenation which will solve our soft-pedalled race problem will produce a hybrid people of wit, ingenuity and capability not at all inferior to the smugly haughty pure Americano, and comely to boot. Point for point this black-and-tan show surpasses the usual run of stage filler offered in the movie mosques; this is said with full consciousness that "Harlem on Parade" is in places unduly dull, smutty, and often merely nerve-shattering...