Tag Archives: literary oddities

H.L. Mencken on Communism

Posted on December 5, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.”

H.L Mencken

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Potboiler

Posted on December 1, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Potboiler: A work written merely to gain a livelihood. The term is at least as old as the 18th c. A classic example of the potboiler that transcends its immediate end is Johnson’s philosophical ‘novel’ or didactic ‘romance’ (qq.v.) Rasselas (1759), which was written in the evenings of a week to defray the expenses of his mother’s funeral and to pay her debts. See KITSCH. 

Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1998.

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G.K. Chesterton on Social Class

Posted on October 31, 2025 | Leave a comment

“The classes that wash most are those that work least.”

G.K. Chesterton

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Architect

Posted on October 24, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Architect, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

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Emerson on the End of the Human Race

Posted on October 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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The Doubter’s Companion: Biography

Posted on September 1, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Biography: Respectable pornography, thanks to which the reader can become a peeping tom on the life of a famous person.

Biography has increasingly replaced the novel as the most popular form of serious reading. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel provided the reader with a reflection of him or herself, today the biography encourages the gratuitous pleasures and self-delusion of voyeurism.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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Write It Right: Dilapidated for Ruined

Posted on August 22, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Dilapidated for Ruined. Said of a building, or other structure. But the word is from the Latin lapis, a stone, and cannot properly be used of any but a stone structure.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Emerson on the End of Humanity

Posted on August 22, 2025 | Leave a comment

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Jean Rostand on Adulthood

Posted on August 1, 2025 | Leave a comment

“To be adult is to be alone.”

Jean Rostand

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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The Doubter’s Companion: Biographical Films

Posted on August 1, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Biographical Films: Since attention to historical detail ruins filmed drama, the essential property of biographical cinema is that it improves in quality by not telling the truth.

These films, whether describing the lives of American presidents or criminals, French generals or Russian kings, are among the beneficiaries of the ‘big lie’ idea. As a result they have helped to create a modern mythology which erases the Western idea of intellectual inquiry and returns to the pre-intellectual tradition of mythological gods and heroes. This is the context in which the portraits of John Kennedy, James Hoffa, Napoleon and so on can most easily be understood.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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