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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: H.L.Mencken born (12/9/1880)
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2024 23:39:22 +1200
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American journalist, essayist and (language link) author of _The 
American Language_.
First edition 1919; 4th edition 1936 "corrected, enlarged, and 
rewritten". Two supplements 1945 (on history of English in the USA) and 
1948 (on pronunciation, spelling, grammar, names, and slang). (Mencken 
died in 1956.)
The copy I have is a 1977 paperback "One Volume Abridged Edition", 
containing the 4th ed, the two supplements, with extensive annotations 
and new material by Raven I.McDavid Jr. (dialectologist). Though 
abridged, still amounting to 777 pages of text and 124 pages of indexes. 
Whew.

Mencken was a cantankerous old bugger with strong and often very 
quotable opinions on almost everything. Crystal quotes him on the 
English of Warren G.Harding, 29th President of the United States:

"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 the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and 
bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken