Cant [ Language & Speech ]
… language too much: ‘the French [language] […] appears to be declining by the natural Inconstancy of that People, and the Affectation of some late Authors to introduce and multiply Cant Words, which is the most ruinous Corruption in any … form of speaking, peculiar to some certain class or body of men. 3. A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms. 4. Barbarous jargon.’ Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language [1755], The sixth edition … in the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic poverty which, in the spirit, ought always to exist in them, …
Controversy | Conversation | Hypocrisy | Rhetoric
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