ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century Britain, with its dictionaries, grammar books, and well-documented efforts to establish a standard form of English, also, surprisingly, witnessed a qualified new appreciation of cant and other nonstandard languages.1 Defining a national standard meant devaluing certain linguistic practices and their speakers as outside of newly set linguistic norms, beyond the pale of polite, rational conversation, yet the end of the century saw the revaluation of substandard expressions, even what had been considered actual criminal (cant) languages, and their supposed speakers. Thus, while the New Canting Dictionary (1725) relegates cant language to "gypsies ... from Bohemia," who, through the use of cant, "render ... their business of thieving difficult to detect," the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) extols cant and vulgar languages as homegrown.2 Its author, Francis Grose, touts the use of vulgar language as a reflection of British "freedom of thought and speech, arising from, and privileged by our constitution" in a nation where "ebullitions of vulgar wit" are not "checked by the fear of the bastinado" (CD,1). Grose's startling reclamation of cant and vulgar expressions reconfigures the languages of putative outsiders as signs of British national culture, incorporating the people into the rhetorical space of the nation via those linguistic practices.
