H. L. Mencken
American editor, satirist, and philologist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, Minority Report, 1956
Posted on May 15, 2000 at 8:45 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, on Warren G. Harding, The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1921
Posted on September 23, 1999 at 11:48 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on November 24, 1999 at 2:31 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Some of the tendencies visible in American — e. g., toward the facile manufacture of new compounds, toward the transfer of words from one part of speech to another, and toward the free use of suffixes and prefixes and the easy isolation of roots and pseudoroots — go back to the period of the first growth of a distinct American dialect and are heritages from the English of the time. They are the products of a movement which, reaching its height in the English of Elizabeth, was dammed up at home, so to speak, by the rise of linguistic self-consciousness toward the end of the reign of Anne, but continued almost unobstructed in the colonies.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on January 15, 2001 at 11:44 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
In small things as in large [the American] exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubberneck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any labored inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in it precisely the boldness and contempt for ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humor of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on June 20, 2000 at 12:59 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Some of the best slang emerges from the argot of college students, but everyone who has observed the process of its gestation knows that the general run of students have nothing to do with the matter, save maybe to provide an eager welcome for the novelties set before them. College slang is actually made by the campus wits, just as general slang is made by the wits of the newspapers and theaters.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on May 18, 2000 at 1:09 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
But the effort made by the authors of such works to police the language, though it has always had the ardent support of certain eminent American literati and of almost the whole body of pedagogues, has never really impeded the natural progress of American. It has gone on developing in spite of them, and in innocent accord with its native genius.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on May 25, 2000 at 3:21 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
What chiefly lies behind [slang] is simply a kind of linguistic exuberance, an excess of word-making energy. It relates itself to the standard language a great deal as dancing relates itself to music.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on August 18, 2000 at 11:21 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were announced, to hooverize appeared spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was employed without any visible sense of its novelty in the debates of Congress.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on September 22, 1998 at 2:52 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, Notebooks, 1956
Posted on October 20, 1998 at 4:39 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on June 25, 1999 at 11:49 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Everyone, including even the metaphysician in his study and the eremite in his cell, has a large vocabulary of slang, but the vocabulary of the vulgar is likely to be larger than that of the cultured, and it is harder worked.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on March 17, 1999 at 7:56 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
—H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, The American Language, 1919
Posted on February 3, 1999 at 1:44 PM
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