Making A Comeback

Last week I was running through ideas for a talk I'll be doing soon on the shifting nature of language. Thinking about shifts in frequency of word use related to fashion, it struck me that the term cant (with reference to insincere, or highly clichéd and, thus, essentially meaningless language), based on my reading, seemed to have seen very frequent use in educated discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dr Johnson and his ilk bandied it about readily, and it was obviously a telling put-down in that period. It occurred to me that we are subjected to vast quantities of cant these days, yet you rarely see the term in writing, and certainly you don't hear it.

Then the other day in an article I was reading about films like Groundhog Day, based on the notion of time repeating itself, I came across the rather fetching phrase inspirational cant, with reference to how such movies tend to move easily into message mode dealing with not-so-subtle implications of the need to send time wisely and live in the now and all that sort of thing. I must say, I'd like to see the word make an unlikely comeback since, as I mentioned above, there so much of it around it deserves a name.