max,

just a followup on the subject of Mencken himself. he was very much an iconoclast and a curmudgeon, but also quite a wit -- one never knows just quite where he was coming from.
it might help to remember that he was also an inveterate coiner of words himself, such as these:

bibliobibuli - people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to world around them
booboisie - 'boobs' as a class (in reference to the American masses)
ecdysiast - a strip teaser

the word 'menckenian' is now used as an allusion for one characterized by vitriolic social criticism

when Mencken used 'chrestomathy' in the title of his book "A Mencken
Chrestomathy", he claimed he did so in part to wrest it back from the
linguists. To critics who argued that the word would not be understood he
replied in splendid arrogance: "Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and
adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still
unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do not solicit their patronage. Let
them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits, and leave my
vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school".
(thanx to Michael B Quinion @ World Wide Words)



"The satisfaction that a man gets out of conquering -- which is
to say, succumbing to -- a woman of noticeable pulchritude is
chiefly the rather banal one of parading her before other men.
He likes to show her off as he likes to show his expensive
automobile or his big door-knob factory."

--H.L. Mencken