The booboisie.

H. L. Mencken coined and popularized “booboisie” as a sardonic label for what he saw as the complacent, philistine mass public—especially the self-satisfied middlebrow culture that, in his view, dominated American politics, morals, and taste in the early 20th century. The term belongs to Mencken’s broader lifelong project as a journalist-critic: puncturing pieties, mocking anti-intellectualism, and attacking cultural conformism. It appears in his essays and commentary as part of his characteristic satirical vocabulary (alongside terms like “Babbitt” and “Bible Belt”), often aimed at the public that rewarded demagogues and enforced conventional respectability.

“Booboisie” blends “boob” (a fool) with “bourgeoisie,” turning a class term into a cultural insult. Mencken’s point is less about economics than about mentality: a majority culture he believed was incurious, moralizing, and hostile to art, science, and independent thought. The word functions as a compressed social diagnosis—suggesting that mediocrity and smugness can be organized, powerful, and culturally hegemonic. It also exemplifies Mencken’s rhetorical method: inventing barbed neologisms to make critique memorable, to shame what he considered mass cant, and to dramatize the tension between elite intellectual standards and democratic popular taste.