00000cam a22000004i 4500 UP-99796217613975292 Buklod 20220322194034.0 a r |||| u| ta 220322s2017 xx d r |||| u| 0691169020 (hardcover) 9780691169026 (hardcover : acid-free paper) (iLib)UPD-00536372128 YDX DCAL rda eng DMLUC PE 1574 S67 2017 Sorensen, Janet author. Strange vernaculars how eighteenth-century slang, cant, provincial languages, and nautical jargon became English Janet Sorensen. Princeton, New Jersey Princeton University Press [2017] x, 334 pages illustrations 25 cm text rdacontent unmediated rdamedia volume rdacarrier Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-320) and index. While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied--from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period--less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the "common people" and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries--from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue--and in novels, poems, and songs, including works by Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and others. Janet Sorensen argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange." Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. English language Etymology. English language 18th century. English language Slang. FO UPD DCAL PE 1574 S67 2017 Book