Word: canting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...since. It includes a list of insulting words and phrases which the Speaker has ruled unsuitable for use in House of Commons debate. Among the banned expressions: insulting dog, behaving like a jackass, cad, caddishness, scurrilous, vicious vulgar, dishonest, swine, corrupt, criminal, blether (as applied to a speech), Pecksniffian cant. Last week the fifteenth edition of "Erskine May" was published; it showed four new epithets barred since the war's end: not a damned one of you opposite, stool pigeons, cheat, bastard...
George Orwell had the gift of honesty as other writers have the gift of the satin phrase. His literary mark was his own: he sniped at all kinds of intellectual cant, loved personal freedom with an irascible passion, felt himself tied to ordinary people by strong memories of plebeian discomfort, and wrote in a style as bare and sharp as a winter tree...
...particularly gifted at recording Negro speech: "I cant hang around.white man's kitchen . . . But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I cant stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I aint got no house...
...Here, There and Everywhere, a volume of essays on slang and cant, Author Partridge subscribes to the theory that English cant had its first big bloom in the Reformation, when dispossessed English priests joined up with thieves and highwaymen and taught them scraps of Latin. By 1630, "Thieves' Latin" had all but passed away, to be replaced by the cant which fathered U.S. gangster and hobo language-a rich mulligan of native ingredients peppered lightly with foreign words, e.g., booze from the Middle Dutch bus en (to tipple), stir from the gypsy stariben (a prison...
Declining Imports. Cant got its second big push in the mid-19th Century, when U.S. cons, doxies, hoboes and fingers stopped importing so much from abroad. Since then, U.S. cant has grown so rapidly that today it is "numerically larger than the British"-and still so wildly prolific that just before his book went to press, hardworking Lexicographer Partridge ordered a batch of addenda bound in to catch such sprouts, new to him, as winchell (a swindler's victim), boodled (loaded with cash), cooties' reveille (lights-out in the cells), hoochie-papping (stealing another man's girl...