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The Future of American. According to Mencken, the sky's the limit. He points out the dominant position of the English language today: in what he calls conservative figures, 174,000,000 people speak it as their native tongue and another 17,000,000 speak it besides their own. Nearest world-competitor is Spanish, with a little more than half as many. And "no other language is spreading so fast or into such remote areas." English looks like the lingua franca of the future, but probably not in its present form. What will it look like? Says Mencken: it may look like English, but it will sound like American.
The Author. If a writer's stature is measured by the influence he has on his contemporaries, then Henry Louis Mencken must be counted great. In the last ten years his influence has dwindled notably, but to a college generation now growing bald he was the greatest debunker of them all. For his vigorous and vivid style, that sometimes rises to heights of rhetoric and grotesque anathema, he has never been given his due rating, being regarded less as a good and aggressively sensible writer than as a sort of public entertainer with a sleeve-full of uproarious phrases. His bull-roaring denunciations have been returned with interest by many a patriot, professor, politician: he has been accused of slandering Abraham Lincoln, ruining the English language, taking money from the onetime Kaiser, spying for the Soviets. In 1928 Mencken published a collection of these attacks (Menckeniana, a Schimpflexicon). Born in Baltimore of German grandparentage. Mencken began to write "seriously" at 12, took T. H. Huxley (see below I for his god at 16. An amiable skeptic, short, fat. boyish to look at, he is fond of practical jokes. Some suspect his philological delvings are merely a form of involved japery. but fellow-philologists take him seriously, call him the authority on U. S. English.
*The Chicago Tribune thus headlined Sir William's appointment: MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF. TO DOPE YANK TALK *As an instance of British borrowins;, Mencken cites the fact that "the London Daily Express has lifted the whole vocabulary of the American newsweekly, TIME, and adopted even its eccentric syntax."