October 17, 2013
Earl of Chesterfield by William Hoare
The word “cant” was commonly used in the 17th and early 18th centuries to mean the speech peculiar to some group. That’s how Lord Chesterfield used it in a 1748 letter of life advice to his son:
Every company…has its particular cant and jargon; which may give occasion to wit and mirth within that circle, but would seem flat and insipid in any other….
By the 1766 edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, the word had gained another meaning, one with more bite:
A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.
The first meaning given today by Dictionary.com follows that one: “insincere, especially conventional expressions of enthusiasm for high ideals, goodness, or piety.”
That’s the meaning we need to recover; for if the word is in decline, the thing, as just defined, is ever more abundant. Modern political discourse consists of little more than the Tinkertoy assembly of cant phrases into speeches: Fix the schools! Out of the shadows! Our brave men and women in uniform! The schools are fine; the “shadow” people are demonstrating in front of TV cameras; and the average American mandarin would faint in horror on hearing that his child had joined the military. Yet still they cant.
(Yes, it’s a verb, too. In a different conversation the following year, Johnson used it thus to great effect: “Don’t cant in defence of savages.” There’s still plenty of that about.)
Practically anything you read or hear about racism, sexism, and homophobia is cant. The most punctilious anti-racists flee like rats from black neighborhoods; the dearth of female mathematicians, in an age when women form an actual majority of college students, is widely understood to be a matter of female preferences, not discrimination; and sensible parents do not leave their kids alone with sexually eccentric adults. Yet the cant goes on.
The reason for this rising tide of cant is not hard to figure. Cant is a smokescreen obscuring unpleasant realities. When I greet a person with the cant phrase, “How are you?” I am signaling that I want to be on friendly terms with him while obscuring the fact that in my current state of unleavened egocentricity”the state most of us are in most of the time”I couldn”t care less about his precise physical condition.
Unpleasant realities have never been popular, and spoken cant smooths out social exchanges as well as it ever did. Reading and listening to our society’s dominant voices, though, I feel sure that a great many of their minds need clearing of cant.
