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The History of salng

The Rise of Cant The history of English since the Middle Ages shows that the vivid perception of slang and similar deviations from customary usage accompanied the rise of a highly conservative prescriptivism in English usage, chiefly after the Restoration of 1660. Prescriptivism developed as an attempt to restrict the rate of change in both spoken and written English. What evidence we have strongly suggests that before the late seventeenth century, which witnessed a dramatic rise in influential critical interest in English usage, scholars and English speakers in general found little occasion to reflect upon what linguists today call levels of discourse; that is, different stylistic levels of vocabulary linked to different kinds of social interaction. Until about 1420 truly formal (learned, serious, or official) writing was ordinarily done in Latin or French. The very idea of a specially cultivated "formal English" in the days after the Norman Conquest (1066), when the English language was little more than an underdog vernacular, would have been a gratuitous and perhaps ridiculous concept, and no medieval scholar was ever moved to urge its development. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales of 1387-1400 varies in tone, but the contrasts fall more naturally between the poetic and the conversational rather than between anything the age could have interpreted as "standard" and "nonstandard." (The fact that Chaucer used the word bones in "The Pardoner's Tale" as a synonym for dice [made of bone] does not imply that bones was slang in the fourteenth century; moreover, the tone of the entire passage weighs heavily against such an interpretation.) We know from writers like Chaucer, the twelfth-century William of Malmesbury, and the fifteenth-century printer William Caxton, that traveled Englishmen of the Middle Ages had an ear for regional differences in pronunciation, grammar, and to some extent vocabulary. Dialects other than one's own were doubtless regarded in the main as peculiar if not laughable (see Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale"). But outside of the church and the law courts, functional literacy was rare before the seventeenth century, and before the eighteenth the reading public by and large had neither the theory nor the motivation to judge which variety of English might be "standard" or morally superior. Not even the king's own usage -- so far as it could be known -- set a standard. We may reflect for a moment on one revealing example of semantic change so as to illustrate a real change in attitudes toward usage current at the end of the English Renaissance. The familiar phrase the king's English has its best known early manifestation in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-98); when Shakespeare wrote of "old abusing of Gods patience and the Kings English" (I iv), the abuse he meant was the employment of language for the unseemly purposes of invective and profane swearing, rather than the violation of some subtle principles of usage. But the phrase was employed earlier and more tellingly still in Thomas Wilson's attack on pretentious "inkhorn terms" in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). The significance to Wilson of the "king's English" is far removed from the modern understanding of the phrase. Whereas today the expression signifies 'fastidious grammar and usage (supposedly "worthy of a king")', Wilson understood it instead as the everyday colloquial English of "most men": Emong al other lessons, this should first be learned, that we never affect any straunge ynkehorne termes, but so speake as is commonly received: neither sekyng to be over fine, nor yet livyng over carelesse, usyng our speache as most men do....Some seke so farre for outlandishe Englishe, that thei forget altogether their mothers language. And I dare sware this, if some of their mothers were alive, thei were not able to tell, what thei say, and yet these fine Englishe clerkes, wil saie thei speake in their mother tongue, if a man should charge them for counterfeityng the kynges English.16 Broad distinctions of style and register are a fundamental aspect of language. There is plenty of evidence that such broad distinctions in English discourse were indeed identifiable to people of the Middle Ages. The surviving Old English poetry, including Beowulf shows that poets and their patrons conceived of poetic language as more metaphorically and syntactically complex than everyday speech. Similarly, specialists in various occupations and pursuits insisted upon the proper use of technical terms: The Boke of St. Albans, by Dame Juliana Barnes (1486), a thorough treatise on hunting and hawking, has a section that specifies "the kyndeli termis that belong to hawkis" and cautions, for example, that a hawk has a "beke" not a "bille" and that "we shall say that hawkis doon Eyer, and not brede in the woodes. And we shall say that hawkys doon draw when they bere tymbering to their nestes, and nott they beld ne make ther nestes."17 Equally certain is that clerics, scholars, and courtiers recognized occasional specific distinctions between ceremonial and everyday English throughout the later Middle Ages; the possibly "over fine" Sir Thomas Elyot, in a wellknown passage in The Boke Named the Governour (1531), had urged upon nobles and gentles (though on no one else) a "cleane polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced" English. But no one subscribed to an equally abstract notion, carried over from the study of Cicero and Virgil, of a polite English vocabulary founded either on taste or on canons of logic. Undoubtedly, fastidious persons would have been irritated by the occasional word that they regarded as obscene, affected, newfangled, or blasphemous. But no cultural or psychological stimulus existed for classifying English words as other than familiar or unfamiliar, technical or everyday, plain or ceremonial, offensive or not. It is notable that no general category remotely corresponding to our present notion of slang seems to have occurred to anyone before the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Occasional examples of the latitude allowed to formal English in earlier times can be found in unlikely places. It has been estimated, for example, that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales contains two hundred separate oaths.18 The exalted prose of the King James Bible (1611), now often held up as a paragon from which our late-twentieth-century English has precipitously declined, has at least two very striking examples of words now considered slang: Leviticus 21:20 gives us "[A man that] hath his stones broken," and in 2 Kings 18:27 we find "They may...drink their own piss with you." And in serious secular writing we have Randle Cotgrave's Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (also 1611), the earliest of French-English lexicons, which runs to eight hundred densely packed pages and boasts sixty thousand serious-minded entries drawn from every field of knowledge. At least one modern scholar has praised its "wit and richness of definition" as well as its "breadth and accuracy," all of which "go to make this one of the world's great books."19 It thus surprises a modern learned sensibility to find among Cotgrave's magisterial pages the following item: Cul de Cheval. A small, and ouglie, fish, or excrescence of the Sea, resembling a mans bung-hole, and called, the red Nettle. Presumably the common red sea anemone (Actinia equina or A. mesembryanthemum) is meant. Pivotal to the concept of slang as an extensive maverick vocabulary -- novel, perverse, and perniciously appealing, especially to the young and to the masses -- was the discovery, before 1530, of a mystifying English criminal cant. This was the English analogue of the French jobelin, which ## François Villon, for its riddlishness and shock value, had already turned to poetic purposes by 1463, and of the German Rotwelsch, alluded to in the thirteenth century but revealed to the learned world in the Liber Vagatorum of ca 1514: Martin Luther himself added a preface to the 1528 edition. Possibly thus alerted to the existence of foreign cant, Robert Copland (The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous, perhaps as early as 1517), John Awdelay (The Fraternitye of Vacabondes, 1560), and Thomas Harman (A Caveat or Warening, for Commen Cursetors, 1567) had little difficulty in ferreting out and publishing exposes of cant in England. Harman was, significantly enough, a justice of the peace and, like his glossarial predecessors, saw the use of cant by cheats and criminals as a menacing linguistic aid to knavery, a loathsome new kind of speech that he memorably condemned as a "feud, lousey language of...lewtering Lusks and lasy Lorrels,...bold, beastly, bawdy Beggars,...vaine Vacabondes" and a whole rampant "rowsey, ragged, rabblement of rakehelles." Yet the synonym pedlyng Frenche, recorded by Copland, indicates that the identity of cant as a register of native English was doubted, though it certainly bore no relationship to French. Albeit the chief difference between cant and other sorts of English lay in its baffling substitution of words like dell and doxy for 'girl' and autem for 'church', schoolmaster Elisha Coles, who first included cant in a general dictionary (his English Dictionary of 1676), seems to have regarded it as a foreign language; and until the latter part of the nineteenth century it was ignorantly believed to be identical with Romani. Its core vocabulary by 1550 probably did not exceed two hundred terms. Though itinerant and mendicant ranks had swelled during 1536-39, when Henry VIII suppressed the English religious houses and monasteries, fluent practitioners of cant probably numbered fewer than ten thousand speakers out of an English-speaking population of under four million.20 Harman's informants led him to the conclusion that English cant was not much older than the dissolution of the monasteries. This is unlikely. Though no proven examples of English cant prior to 1517 have ever been identified, at least some of the material collected by Harman, Awdelay, and Copland must have originated in the 1400's, if not earlier. Yet not until the sixteenth century did scholarship become aware of cant as something new and unsettling: a substantial renegade language, transgressing "without order or reason" the boundaries of sanctioned speech. Awareness of the existence of cant had far-ranging implications for English rhetoricians; it ultimately gave rise to the idea of a much broader but equally-to-be-condemned category of slang -- a word that at one time was interchangeable with cant itself.