What made the four editions of The American Language, like Mencken's first Supplement, so accessible and hence so influential, was its enormous literary skill and vigilant cultural criticism. As such it stands high in the tradition of the great amateurs, from Dr. Johnson himself to Horne Tooke and Noah Webster.

This is not to say that Mr. Mencken is not also scholarly. He is admirably and delightfully so. His footnotes are as good as his text, and one finds in him that whimsical excess of information which shows a man superior to his system and amused at the ramifications of inquiry. For instance, in explaining the term “baloney dollar,” he tells us not only its inventor and its meaning, but also its value and the date of the decree establishing its gold contents...

Clear, colloquial, astringent, Mencken’s prose—like Mark Twain’s—reveals its subject and conceals its art. The only ornament it tolerates is a figure of rhetoric which deserves to be called a Merickenism—something that ranges between irony and sarcasm, less premeditated than the first and more impassive than the second, but so sparing of effect that it almost always takes the reader unaware.

I suppose, as a critic, I have read every edition of this book since it came out. This time I picked it up idly, just to see what the new editors had done with it, and two days later discovered that I had reread it all. It is still as absorbing as the best detective story.

Why? I already know all the information it has to give... What makes the book so hypnotically enchanting is simply Mencken. This is one case where the style was the man, for sure. It’s not just that his prose is muscular and sure. It’s not just that he says precisely what he wants to say, with the greatest deftness. It’s not that he is full of hilarious jokes and mockery. In the final analysis, it is what he was, what he stood for, and that is something that has gone from American life.