The moral panic about bad language in England, 1691–1745

Abstract

In this paper I use a corpus of the writings of the Society for the Reformation of Manners to look at the discursive construction of attitudes to bad language in English. Using this corpus of texts as an example of a moral panic about language I use keywords to explore moral panic rhetoric, the formation of spirals of signification and the impact of both on attitudes to bad language in English in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.