https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/29/h-l-mencken-misfit-in-21st-century-america/
H.L. Mencken, a contrarian polemicist and the consummate critic, who wrote prolifically and prodigiously from 1899 until 1948, may no longer seem relevant, but the fault would not be his.
Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to immutable truth. He was also a brilliant satirist and a writer whose facility with the English idiom and grasp of intellectual history remain unsurpassed.
How can a phenom like Mencken appeal in our age, The Age of the Idiot?
He can’t. He should, but he can’t.
Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour “dunderheads” America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.
How could Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and “editors” excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth?
Not for nothing did one wag say that the history of ideas is the history of words. And since Mencken was, first and foremost, a man of ideas (and hence, words)—no discussion of Mencken and his ideas is complete without a reference to English, the language he deployed with such verve and vim.
Thus, when “a few newspaper smarties protested” Mencken’s verbal virtuosity, Mencken tartly noted, in his Preface to A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949): “Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives . . . are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses. Let them . . . leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.”
Written at a considerable level of abstraction, for a prosaic people that, by Mencken’s estimation, “cannot grasp an abstraction,” a Mencken essay is certain to furrow the brow of the above-average American reader, writer, and editor these days. Unlike the tracts disgorged by Conservatism, Inc., the least complicated of Mencken’s editorial writings would place excessive demands on the unsupple minds of young activists, who are busy striking a selfie on social media or running to CPUKE conferences.
