H. L. Mencken was always a provocative essayist, ready to surprise his readers with unpredictable attacks or new directions of cultural inquiry. Ethnic works from Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle (1931) to Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and authors from Claude McKay to John Fante attested to the freeing influence of Mencken’s essays. Among the many topics he pursued, Mencken’s deepest interest was in language as it was actually spoken in the United States. He observed the linguistic enrichment that came with features of modernity such as the streetcar: “Trolley crews, in the days of their glory, had their jargon, too,” he wrote in 1948, “ e.g., boat for a trolley-car, horse for a motorman, poor-box for a fare-box, stick for a trolley-pole and Sunday for any day of light traffic.” Drawing on the “Lexicon of Trade Jargon,” a Federal Writers’ Project manuscript, he also noted that the trolley-car “gave us the expression to slip one’s trolley.”

Mencken was fascinated by the linguistic consequences of America’s multi-ethnic makeup, and undertook a still unparalleled effort to examine the many ethnic and non-English tributaries to the “American Language.” It is telling that Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang,” published in Mencken’s American Mercury, was accompanied by a glossary of the slang she employed, including “Big Apple” for New York, apparently still in need of annotation in 1942. Mencken was interested in all semantic and grammatical features that made American different from British English, and he called attention to many aspects of multilingualism that were present in America.