ABSTRACT
John Locke stands out for theorizing functional vernaculars of idea-communication improvable by an English-language education from childhood orbiting around propriety and aesthetics. What became the British New Rhetoric represents this Lockean foundation intersecting with the work of Bernard Lamy, René Rapin, and others to reactivate the belletristic terminologies of Cicero and Quintilian. Pioneers John Lawson, John Ward, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, John Witherspoon, and Joseph Priestley laid the groundwork for George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Richard Whately, whose reformulations live on in textbook genres used today.
