Cant [ Language & Speech ]
… that might threaten the social fabric. In the seventeenth century, with the rise of religious tensions and the civil wars, ‘cant’ came to be used to satirise the preaching of Puritans and non-conformists and what was considered by … ‘abuses of words’. 3 Jonathan Swift, in 1712, published a letter addressed to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, in which he warned his readers against the potential decadence of the English language it if were to imitate the French language too … age of cant’ to highlight the fact that controversies on morality and language raged in the Revolutionary era and afterwards. 11 French political philosophy and moral preoccupations were deemed unmanly and characterised by their fraudulent …
Controversy | Conversation | Hypocrisy | Rhetoric
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