Today we mark the 1880 birth of Henry Louis Mencken. Editor, journalist, and curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken is remembered as both a caustic critic of his country and as his era's foremost authority on our American language.

In his book The American Language, Mencken observes, "America is itself unutterably vulgar." But, he goes on to argue, vulgarity, after all, means no more than "a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions," and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making. According to Mencken, "the history of English, like the history of American and of every other living tongue, is a history of vulgarisms that, by their accurate meeting of real needs, have forced their way into sound usage."

Mencken provides plenty of examples. Consider burglarize and itemize, two verbs created, he says, by "torturing nouns with harsh affixes." Similarly vulgar are the verbs resurrect and jell, which he describes as "produced by groping for the root." Care to check in on some terms H.L. Mencken labels "barbaric inventions"? Try go-getter, tasty, he-man, and all right.

Mencken notes that all these once-controversial words are now established and deserving of study. But he admits that his chief excuse for looking at language is human interest; according to Mencken, such investigations prod deeply into national idiosyncrasies and ways of mind, and that sort of prodding is always entertaining.