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“[I]t is not the leadership that is old and decorous
that fetches [the American], but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He
will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with
almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics,
religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the
United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats,
or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor
or piece of slang.”—American journalist, essayist, and philologist H.L. Mencken
(1880-1956), The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States (1919)
