'The Roll of Incomprehensible Polysyllables'

It still makes me laugh when H.L. Mencken refers to Warren Gamaliel Harding as “Dr. Harding,” a simple dig that simultaneously disposes of the verbally maladroit president and pompous academics. The president had been in office only six weeks when Mencken published “A Short View of Gamalielese” in The Nation. First he disposes of Harding’s predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Of Wilson’s spoken words Mencken writes: “There was no passion there, hot, exigent, and challenging. They could not make one puff and pant. . . .” Then it’s Harding’s turn:

“One had to wait for Dr. Harding for that. In his style there is pressure, ardency, effortcy, gasping, a high grunting, Cheyne-Stokes breathing. It is a style that rolls and groans, struggles and complains. It is the style of a rhinoceros liberating himself by main strength from a lake of boiling molasses.”

Mencken emphasizes that Harding’s language is not incomprehensible. We may be a long way from Lincoln but the president can usually be understood:

“This is awful stuff, I grant you, but is it actually unintelligible? Surely not. Read it slowly and critically, and it may boggle you, but read it at one flash, and the meaning will be clear enough. Its method is that of pointillisme. The blotches of color are violent, and, seen too closely they appear insane, but stand off a bit and a quite simple and even austere design is at once discerned.”

Today we assume politicians are fluent in a pidgin of focus-group pablum, bumper stickers and native bombast that bears little resemblance to the way literate humans speak, and we assume it is intended to hornswoggle us. Americans in 1921 were less jaded. Two years earlier, Mencken had published the first edition of The American Language, a work that eventually swelled to more than 2,300 pages. In the Harding piece, when speculating on the origin of the president’s linguistic gifts, he adopts the faux-lingo of linguists:

“That style had its origin under circumstances that are surely not unknown to experts in politico-agrarian oratory. It came to birth on the rustic stump, it developed to full growth among the chautauquas, and it got its final polishing in a small-town newspaper office. In brief, it reflects admirably the tastes and traditions of the sort of audience at which it was first aimed, to wit, the yokelry of the hinterland, naive, agape, thirsty for the prodigious, and eager to yell.”

Mencken here is returning to one of his favorite riffs, assaulting the unlettered rubes of the “booboisie.” He would eventually become tiresome on the subject, in particular after the Scopes Trial in 1925, but in 1921 the shtick retained most of its charm:

“Such an audience has no fancy for a well-knit and succinct argument, packed with ideas. Of all ideas, indeed, it is suspicious, but it will at least tolerate those that it knows by long hearing, those that have come to the estate of platitudes, those that fall readily into gallant and highfalutin phrases. Above all, it distrusts perspicuity, for perspicuity is challenging and forces one to think, and hence lays a burden on the mind. What it likes most of all is the roll of incomprehensible polysyllables—the more incomprehensible the better.”

Few writers are less capable of concealing their delight in piling on the glories of our native tongue, American English, than Mencken. Some of the linguistic felonies and misdemeanors he lodges against Harding are committed, in a very different spirit, by Mencken: “He has forced [words] into strange and abhorrent marriages. He has stretched them as if they were chewing-gum. He has introduced pipes into them and pumped them until they screamed. He has put them to cruel and unusual uses. He has shown them no mercy.”