… on how to address social superiors in the correct manner and to hold a polite conversation. 1 . Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660-1720 (Oxford, 2003), p. 28. Their publishers, mostly … (1784) invented exuberant or ridiculous mottoes to mock the Lords’ social standing. Laughter and derision fitted in a politics of sociability. However, in the late eighteenth century and at the outset of the nineteenth century, the sudden …