Word: canting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...talking to the wall in front of them. But gradually, the scene becomes familiar: soon it becomes possible to detect the ultra-polite, unemotional tone of voice that is the trademark of only one profession, and finally, one makes out a phrase here and there and recognizes the cant of Harvard operators...
...this refreshing manual, Schickel manages to avoid every classic bromide. The divorcee is not seen as muggee or neglected saint, older women are consistently praised, and the references to sex are free of cant and prurience: "There are still people in this world who like to think things over, and they often turn out to be very good people indeed ... If she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to. So be a good sport about it, for God's sake...
...seigneurial cant to romanticize work that is truly detestable and destructive to workers. But misery and drudgery are always comparative. Despite the sometimes nostalgic haze around their images, the pre-industrial peasant and the 19th century American farmer did brutish work far harder than the assembly line. The untouchable who sweeps excrement in the streets of Bombay would react with blank incomprehension to the malaise of some $17-an-hour workers on a Chrysler assembly line. The Indian, after all, has passed from "alienation" into a degradation that is almost mystical. In Nicaragua, the average 19-year-old peasant...
...backlash that curbed the effectiveness of the civil rights movement. Carson's account shows the folly of rhetoric when it is unaccompanied by the work of organizing, of creating support. "During the final year of SNCC's existence, staff members became increasingly dogmatic and isolated. Formerly controversial ideas became cant and posturing. SNCC's demise as a national organization merely confirmed the earlier death of its singular spirit and of the black struggles that had produced that spirit...
...labor camp, Uspensky's dictionary was born. "On the way to the camp, I encountered some convicts who were using a sort of prison jargon," he remembers. "In the camp, people were talking in a Russian so rich in slang terms and thieves' cant that at first I couldn't understand...