From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   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   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)