The Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, is largely forgotten these days, but as a magazine journalist writer, editor, and critic in the early 1900s he was the country’s most powerful influencer.  He earned lasting fame for his monumental “American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of the English Language in the United States.”  It was a huge hit in 1919, especially for a reference book, and remains in print.  Amazon’s review describes how Mencken’s “groundbreaking study clarifies the differences between British and American English and defines the distinguishing characteristics of American English …. Mencken succeeds not only in providing a lucid description of the American language but also in making his readers laugh, wince, and nod in agreement. It’s a readable and fascinating study on why you say ‘tomayto’ and I say ‘tomahto.’ A must read for anyone who loves words.”  American Language came in 49^th in theGuardian.com’s “100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time” article because “Mencken’s ‘The American Language’ is a creature of its time, a flexing of American cultural muscle …. After Mencken, in the words of the critic Edmund Wilson, ‘American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect’.”        

            Few lexophiles (the fancy word for word lovers) have ever approached Mencken’s adoration of his second language (he graduated from a German-language high school in Baltimore).  His book includes citations showing that our word “fan” wasn’t derived from “fanatic” but from the British use of “fancy,” as in “Fancy a cup of tea?”  Discovering “American Language” made me a Mencken fan before encountering his other works, which is just as well, for he was a bitingly sarcastic satirist.  However, a National Endowment for the Humanities essay by Danny Heitman, “H. L. Mencken as a Boy?  Oh, Boy!” noted that “Mencken’s unflinching columns and essays electrified the country …. In the 1920s, young people disillusioned by the aftermath of World War I found resonance in Mencken’s words, said Hamilton Owens, a journalistic protégé. ‘His was the point of view they wanted. His harsh realism, his complete scorn for the prevailing patriotic hypocrisies, his ‘destructiveness’ and above all his uproarious gusto at swinging his ax on the idols gave them that sense of direction which they had lacked’.  Mencken’s tone, though, leaned toward bemusement, not bitterness.”

            Mencken wrote that “American shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech and by sheer brilliance of imagination.”  That sounds like it’s coming from a fundamental optimist, and it’s fitting for mid-February since that’s when baseball’s spring training begins, and every fan still harbors unblemished hope.  The 950-page 2^nd supplement to American Language contains many lists, including terms related to professions, such as beauticians (a “daisy” is a freckle, a “harvest” is “a plucking of eyebrows,” a “meat-grinder” is a constant talker, a “sponge” is “a customer willing to try all the treatments and lotions suggested”), and booksellers (a “plug” is “a good book no one wants,” and an “interior decorator” is “a dealer specializing in sets,”  Those are preceded by a list of baseball expressions such as “Gillette” (“a ball thrown as a player’s head,” as in “a close shave”), “can o’ corn” (an easy to catch fly ball), “maggot” (a team owner – “apparently from ‘magnate’”), and “Texas Leaguer” (“a pop fly which nevertheless takes the batter to first base,” AKA a blooper, bleeder, sinker, pooper,and drooper.  Texas leaguer resonates doubly with my fellow Texas Rangers fans, whose history’s littered with exotic disappointments, such as pitchers who played while high on LSD (Dock Ellis) and had voodoo-related catatonic comas minutes before game time (Roger Moret), to a “can o’ corn” fly ball hit to outfielder Jose Canseco bouncing of his truly thick head for a home run, to catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia (longest name in MLB history) who suddenly forget how to throw the ball back to the pitcher.  I could go on at length.  But it’s spring training, optimism reigns, and as Bernard Berenson said, “Miracles happen to those who believe in them.”

            Heitman noted that “Alistair Cooke, who became friends with Mencken as a young reporter, said those who read Mencken’s fiery pronouncements in print were often shocked to discover how genial he was in person, when they met him ….  ‘I was on the fattish side as an infant,’ Mencken notes in Happy Days. ‘If cannibalism had not been abolished in Maryland some years before my birth I’d have butchered beautifully’.”  With lines like that Mencken charmed me with his three-volumes titled “Happy Days” (covering his childhood) “Newspaper Days” (working for the Baltimore Sun), and “Heathen Days” creating and editing his Smart Set and American Mercury magazines).  “Happy Days” was particularly appealing.  Mencken came from a comfortably well-off German immigrant family; his father co-owned a leading cigar factory and enrolled his son in the local German-language school.  The family was steeped in German culture, and Mencken clung to it through both world wars, while condemning the Nazis.  His fame and influence were at their height when the U.S. declared war on Germany, and Mencken greatly reduced his regular magazine writing and focused on compiling “American Language.”  A Library of Congress article, “Shadows of War,” described “The coming of World War I brought with it a backlash against German culture in the United States. When the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, anti-German sentiment rose across the nation, and German American institutions came under attack. Some discrimination was hateful, but cosmetic: The names of schools, foods, streets, and towns, were often changed .… Physical attacks, though rare, were more violent …. The most pervasive damage was done, however, to German language and education.”  German-language newspapers were closed, and “German-language books were burned, and Americans who spoke German were threatened with violence or boycotts. German-language classes … were discontinued and, in many areas, outlawed entirely. None of these institutions ever fully recovered.”

            In 1917 one of my favorite old-time baseball players, Herman “Germany” Schaefer, changed his nickname to “Liberty,” just as sauerkraut was becoming “liberty cabbage.”  He was a decent player, a recognized baseball tactician, a delightful teammate, and an outstandingly colorful character.  His non-stop antics, according to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), included using two bats to row across the field to his position at second base, dramatically tightrope walking the foul lines, and much more.  In Lawrence Ritter’s 1966 collection of old player’s oral histories, “The Glory of their Times,” Davy Jones, a Detroit Tigers outfielder, recalled a game that SABR confirmed when Jones was on third base, Schaefer was on first base, and their team was down a run.  Trying to draw a throw from the catcher, Schaefer stole second base hoping the runner on third could score.  The catcher didn’t bite, so Schaefer persisted in distracting by stealing first base – there was no rule to prevent that until a year after Schaefer’s death from tuberculosis in 1919 – and then Schaefer stole second again, the catcher tried to throw him out, but both he and Jones were safe.  In another game Jones saw Schaefer called in to pinch hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth with a man on base and his team down by one.  First, Schaefer flamboyantly announced to the crowd from the batter’s box that he would hit a home run over the right-field fence and did so with the first pitch he saw.  Then as he ran the bases, he proceeded to slide headfirst into each base in turn while announcing his progress as if it was a horse race and ending at home plate by declaring “Schaefer wins by a nose.”  The man had fun.

            There’s a lot troubling our old world at present, and that’s why it’s important to put your mind in a pleasanter place from time to time, like enjoying spring training, because, as Chicago Cub shortstop Ernie Banks, whose nickname was “Mr. Sunshine,” said “Spring training means flowers, people coming outdoors, sunshine, optimism, and baseball.  Spring training is a time to think about being young again.”  There are many terrible things going on around us, but at least in the springtime I can agree with Walt Whitman, baseball “tends to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set.”  Sure, political turmoil seems the order of the day, but heed sportswriter Pete Hamill, who wrote “Don’t tell me about the world.  Not today.  It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning, and the kids are trying to hit the curveball.”