Coined and counterfeit language in Renaissance England

Abstract

To describe imported and new words in the rapidly changing English vernacular, Renaissance writers rely upon metaphors that emphasize similarities between linguistic exchange and features of the economy, like coining, borrowing, and counterfeiting. Concerns surrounding the stability of the early modern British economy provided analogies that could be readily applied to concerns about the legitimacy of the vernacular. Like the unstable and inflationary British economy that serves as the backdrop of early modern discussions of linguistic economies, foreign and Latinate terms were implicated in excess, uncertain value, and fraudulence committed against society at large.