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menckenese noun. A provocative and often caustic writing style patterned after the journalist H. L. Mencken.

Example Citation:
"[It is] difficult to read through a daily paper without finding a feature writer who employs Menckenese."
—George Mayberry

Notes:
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties."

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry."

"The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor."

"Self-respect- The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."

Related Words:
Christianese
crosswordese
Internetese

Subject Category:
Culture - Writing

Posted on October 16, 1997 at 8:36 AM
Updated on October 16, 1997 at 8:36 AM


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