Strange Vernaculars. How Eighteenth-Century Slang, Cant, Provincial Languages, and Nautical Jargon Became English by Janet Sorensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Strange Vernaculars. How Eighteenth-Century Slang, Cant, Provincial Languages, and Nautical Jargon Became English by Janet Sorensen Julie Coleman Janet Sorensen. Strange Vernaculars. How Eighteenth-Century Slang, Cant, Provincial Languages, and Nautical Jargon Became English. Princeton: Princeton, 2017. Pp. xii + 334. $39.95. Ms. Sorensen's book is a widely ranging and densely written account of the documentation and representation of nonstandard English in the eighteenth century, arguing that unfamiliar and obscure linguistic forms were incorporated into a broader notion of Britishness during this period. A thread running through the analysis is the multiplicity of linguistic forms found in eighteenth-century Britain and represented in the literature of the period: "many people would have encountered linguistic strangeness and multiplicity in what was supposed to be one linguistically unified nation." Britain has never been without linguistic variety, but it would necessarily have become more apparent as national and international trade increased, particularly in the context of a rapidly growing capital city. Different forms of English are merely covariants unless there is an accepted standard form; however, a great deal of the conscious work of codification of that standard took place in the eighteenth century. Borders between different types of nonstandard language are both fluid and porous, and it can be difficult three centuries later to distinguish between cant and proverb, or cant and colloquial language or vulgarity and swearing. Ms. Sorensen makes some notable observations on the incomprehensibility of works that use too much unfamiliar language. Regarding Dekker's Lanthorne and Candlelight (1608), for example, she argues that glossaries are an inadequate key to canting verse and that this "stage[s] the unfamiliarity of cant as mysterious and not fully knowable." Readers' partial incomprehension [End Page 183] generates a sentimental (emotional) rather than a strictly semantic response. Similarly, she argues that footnoted technical language in Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762) impedes readers' comprehension and flattens their emotional response to sailors' attempts to avoid shipwreck and "also raises emotions with its disorienting obscurity." It is, however, worth noting that Dekker needed to churn out publications to make a living and that Falconer added the footnotes after writing his poem. Thus, I would be tempted to argue that Dekker did not compile his glossary very carefully and that Falconer's footnotes are an aid to comprehension rather than a literary device. In her discussion of cant, Ms. Sorensen argues that realist fiction and dictionaries of the eighteenth century shared "generic work in producing the very idea of the nation"; writers such as Smollett, Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson, "who have come to define Britishness" and who set their work in "unmistakeably British landscapes," used rhetoric, which is "recognizably … British." The value of this argument is not necessarily undermined by distance, but there is a circularity in categorizing a group of authors on the basis of a very general shared characteristic and then using that broad categorization to define their purpose in very specific terms. The discussion of slavery in relation to cant concludes that "The abstraction of the universal freedom of the 'free' British subject depends upon particularization, on the development of the notion of nationalized and racialized subjects who form defining counters to that freedom." This is built on a discussion of Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack's transportation to America and later affluence there, a passing allusion to ancient slavery in the introduction to B.E.'s New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (c. 1699), and a few entries in that dictionary and in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). For example, B.E. defines Black Indies as "Newcastle, from whence the coals are brought," which Ms. Sorensen reads as "an evocative use of distant, colonized zones of slavery to name English places, specifically introducing connections between blackness and brutal labor." This represents an elision between our contemporary understanding of the inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade and an allusive use of Indies to refer to a region from which riches can be derived (OED, s.v. Indies 2), which does not, in my view, necessarily suggest any sensitivity to the means of production. The connection hinges on the...