Fresh language old and new (tactically incompetent salmon)

So much of public writing is tired. Not bad, just tired. Fowler, Orwell, and others counsel to use language creatively, to cast aside the crutch of cliches, tropes, and other banalities. Easier said than done.

When writing a piece with that goal in mind it slows you down to a crawl. Easier by far to to simply let the thought roll out, touch it up for repetitions, grammatical errors, misspellings, and then send it into the internet storm. Given the financial troubles of media companies, there are ever fewer editors to goad writers into freshening up their work original thinking and phrasing.

Or so it seems to me.

Yet there are some twitches of originality. In the past year or two, I keep coming across an arresting word play or sentence construction which give hope for refreshing writing. No idea whether this perceived trend is indeed real, much less why it might be happening. But I am hoping it is real.

This is brought to mind while reading a review of a new collection of H.L. Mencken essays. 'My Plan Is to Let People Do Whatever They Please' The daily newspaper columns of H.L. Mencken review by Bill Kauffman. Now, it is almost impossible to douse oneself with Mencken and not come away with a new appreciation of language and communication. The man was a word machine, thousands of words a week over decades. He held his audience not with lazy writing and a lattice of cliches. He courted words and constructed phrases not heard before or since. His love of language extended to three hefty volumes of The American Language.

It is indisputable that Mencken is now a controversial figure. His quick mind and vivid language dealt with all sorts of views entirely alien, not to say unacceptable, to modern ears. It is easy to pick out classism, racism, authoritarianism, and anti-semitic elements in his thinking. And yet he does not fit easily into any modern category. He opposed American involvement in foreign wars. He opposed lynching. He advocated reason and science. He objected to segregation. He sponsored talented African American writers. His own definition of theology reflects the difficulty of categorizing his body of thought - "Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing."

Actually, that's a pretty good description of much of our modern political reporting an discourse - explaining the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

And while he can seem a man of antediluvian views, many of his excessive battles reflected early jousts with issues prevalent today. One of his first books was Men Versus the Man: A Correspondence Between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H. L. Mencken, Individualist.

There is no irony in the fact that H.L. Mencken is a tall figure in the history of letters, and Robert Rives La Monte is wholly forgotten. La Monte, who worked at the Baltimore News as well as being an editor for the International Socialist Review, was a true believer in the promise of Socialism. Here he writes six letters trying to convince H.L. Mencken to reject his selfish ways and become a comrade in the revolution, to usher in a perfect world of total equality and universal brotherhood.

Mencken, long time writer for the Baltimore Sun, editor of The American Mercury, and prolific author and essayist, was the absolute worst choice of target for an evangelist of the common man. There have been few who were as openly resolved to a robust Nietzschean individualism. And so, in one of the turn of the last centuries greatest “flame wars,” we have the Bard of Baltimore’s six responses to those appeals.

The battle of the “collective good” versus “individual liberty” still rages in pitched battles. La Monte’s voice is rightfully now just one of many faceless advocates of class-warfare, and Mencken’s personality survives as the greatest advocate of social Darwinism and thus ultimately Mencken’s own views.

We don't call them socialists or Marxists any more, we call them social justice warriors, postmodernists, activists. But the spirit of authoritarian collectivism stalks the land clashing with American notions of freedom, liberty, individualism, consent of the governed and rule of law.

I find it hard to read Mencken in bulk but an essay or two a month can serve as an intellectual cold shower - not comfortable but invigorating. He forces the reader to be clearer in their own ideas and arguments. Strong language, striking thought, fresh words. He challenges from beyond the grave.

Kauffman begins his review:

Oh, that H.L. Mencken were alive today!

You don't hear that wistful resurrectionary sentiment voiced much anymore. A modern newspaper columnist writing in Mencken's gleeful style, with its joyful savagery, its jocose sesquipedalianism, its sheer delight in the American language, would be met with astonished horror on the order of Henry James watching a Sam Kinison video or Robby Mook meeting a man who owns a pickup truck. (I should warn you that one cannot write about Mencken without aping him, however clumsily.)

The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the "cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing" whose purpose was the extirpation, the annihilation, of anything resembling a robust exchange of ideas. Two beliefs puffed up the righteous censor, according to Mencken: first, "that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil," and second, "that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift!"

"Rumbustiously splenetic critic" - that was what caught my eye.

Among modern writers, the only one I am aware of who takes such joy in fresh language is Kurt Schlichter, trial Lawyer/Partner, Army Colonel (Retired), polemicist and famous for "being direct on Twitter." From recent columns:

The Senate GOP Sissy Caucus of sanctimonious twits

[snip]

Here’s the thing – most of Trump supporters aren’t takers – they’re makers. They’re the people the government flunkies come to with their palms up whenever some bureaucrat wants to spend a zillion bucks studying LGBT issues among Antarctic penguins or funding the NPR’s X-rated reenactments of the Nativity.

[snip]

Yeah, that the sexes are different is totally a thing no matter what your ponytailed grad student TA at Oberlin told you.

[snip]

Here’s what he saw – a girl ditches her Emmy party date to hit on him, she flirts over their respective smartphones, he asks her out, she comes over to his place, drinks, goes to dinner, drinks, goes back to his place, drinks, gets naked and plays President Bill n’ the Naughty Intern, then leaves.

[snip]

ISIS is dead - rest in pieces, you Seventh Century pederast cowards.

[snip]

Just a couple weeks ago, the Dems were giddy about how they were totally going to ride a tsunami into the midterms and take back the House and maybe even the Senate. The ballot preference numbers for the GOP were uglier than an unshaven Womyn’s Studies professor in a V-hat.

[snip]

So, up until their inevitable humiliating capitulation, the Dems were stuck swimming upstream against the current of prosperity – they are the tactically incompetent salmon of American politics – when they had a brainstorm. Even as they valiantly raged against Trump’s success, they managed to find a way to fail even more hilariously.

[snip]

Sure, window-licking scold Nancy Pelosi thought it was a great idea – blue America has some very different ideas of what’s a good idea than Normal America.

[snip]

With their sorta-Republican co-conspirators Sailor Suit Lindsey Graham and Jeff “18% Approval” Flake, they insisted that the GOP alienate its own base in order to swell the Democrats’ base.

[snip]

But they were mightily miffed when Trump refused to take the worst deal since Burt Reynolds convinced Ned Beatty to trade places with him in Jon Voight’s canoe.

Window-licking scold, Sailor Suit Lindsey Graham, Bill n' the Naughty Intern? Where does he get these phrases? It doesn't matter. They are fresh and can be amusing. And clear; you are left in no doubt as to his position.

Like Mencken, Schlichter can be on the fringe of polite society. In fact, I suspect he happily has a permanent bivouac there. But agree with him or not, he commands the language like a regiment, taking it places we haven't seen before. Wish we had more writers with his grasp of creative communication.