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Call The Jewish News 354.6060 The Times' own stylebook, informed Safire, advises a spelling of "Hanukkah." Webster's New World Dic- tionary lists both "Hanukkah" and "Hanukah," (with or without a final "h"). The AmericanHeritageDic- tionary allows a choice of the spellings offered by (Webster's New World . Dic- tionary, but advises that both are variants of "Chanukah." This last spelling, wrote Safire, was the chosen by the Supreme Court when it wrote its recent ruling that the public display of a meno- rah had both a secular and a religious meaning. Why did the court choose this more phonetic spelling, ,Times'intrepid reporter Tony Mauro asked of the justices' public information office. Because, came the an- swer, "it's a spelling of first impression," a response, commented Safire, "that hardly seems the way to spell out the decisions of the nation's unappealable court." Safire, never one to hold back on his own decisions, ruled that the English spell- ing "which comes closest to the sound of the Hebrew word .. is `Hannuka' which leads most to HAN-uh-kuh, a reasonably close approx- imation for those who resist gargling." Was Mencken's Bigotry The Norm? One shudders to think what H.L. Mencken would • have thought of all this talk of the proper way to spell Chanukah. With the forthcoming publication of Mencken's diary, Mencken has been revealed to have been a ploset anti-Semite and anti- black. Efforts are being made to put Mencken's nastiness in the context of his time when prejudice was supposedly nastier, more common, and more accepted in society. Last week, the New York Times' op-ed page ran two columns offering this ex- planation for Mencken's vituperation. One was written by Times'columnist, Russell Baker, who grew up just a block away from Baltimore's Union Square, where Mencken lived, and was "profoundly unshocked" to learn that Mencken har- bored such prejudice. "To have been utterly free of such stuff in Mencken's time and place would have been astonishing," wrote Baker. In southwest Baltimore in the 1930s and 1940s, "we were all racists and anti-Semites and much more .. ." — a brave admis- sion for someone who has built most of his career around genteel bon moth and misty-eyed autobiographies. "In those times," explain- ed Baker, "we hadn't yet learned to mask our thoughts with pseudo- civilized cunning. We all spoke meanly of each other back there, and it wasn't quite as monstrous as it now seems, believe me. You had to be there." - Someone who was there was Gwinn Owens, a former editor of the Baltimore Eve- ning Sun, whose father was Mencken's editor at the paper. Owens admits to "a power- ful admiration" for what Mencken wrote in his published works and that "without apologizing for him, ... today's readers are unaware how commonplace racial slurs and stereotypes were in the 1920s and 1930s." Owens seeks, somewhat inconclusively, to compare Mencken and the virulent anti-Semite, German com- poser Richard Wagner, whose operas one "can still appreciate for their artistic beauty. The work is separated from the man. Or is it?" One writer who did not hide behind Mencken's times was Paul Greenberg,