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| The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. |
| —“The General Character of American English” |
| H.L. Mencken |
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| H.L. Mencken |
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| 1880–1956, American editor, author, and critic, b. Baltimore, studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic. He began his journalistic career on the Baltimore Morning Herald, became editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald, and from 1906 until his death was on the staff of the Baltimore Sun or Evening Sun. From 1914 to 1923 he was coeditor of the Smart Set with George Jean Nathan; together they started the American Mercury in 1924, and Mencken was the sole editor from 1925 to 1933. Mencken’s pungent and iconoclastic criticism, although aimed at all complacent attitudes, was chiefly directed at the middle class.—continue at Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press. |
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Pronunciation:  m ng´k n from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. |
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- WORKS
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- The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 2nd ed. (1921)
This classic bridges the discrepancies between British and American English and defines the distinguishing characteristics of the language of the United States.
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- Mencken, H.L., 39077 to 39305
Entries from the Columbia World of Quotations.
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