Chic seems". By contrast, in Anita Loos' novel, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1925), the diarist Lorelei Lee recorded that "the French use the word 'sheik' for everything, while we only seem to use if for gentlemen when they seem to resemble Rudolf Valentino" (a pun derived from the latter's being the star of the 1921 silent film, "The Sheik"). The Oxford Dictionary gives the comparative and superlative forms of "chic" as "chicer" and "chicest". These are wholly English words: the French equivalents would be "plus chic" and "le/la plus chic". "Super-chic" is sometimes used: "super-chic Incline bucket in mouth-blown, moulded glass". An
Anita Loos a devoted admirer of H. L. Mencken and when he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan. Loos adored Mencken with what may have been love and preferred this group over the Round Table. She gradually realized Emerson paled in comparison to someone like Mencken, and disappointingly, high-IQ gentlemen didn't fall for women with brains, but those with more "downstairs". In 1925, on the train to Hollywood for another Talmadge picture,