menuSpeaking by Station: Polite, Low, and Women's Speech

Chapter 8: Speaking by Station: Polite, Low, and Women's Speech

Learning Objectives

  1. Recognize the specialized vocabulary of "polite" or courtly speech and the situations that called for it.
  2. Use the rambling, emphatic, money-conscious patterns typical of "low" or plain speech.
  3. Identify a small number of speech habits associated, in period sources, with women's conversation.

So far this book has treated eighteenth-century English as more or less one thing. It wasn't. A Virginia gentlewoman writing to a friend, a tobacco factor haggling over a debt, and a servant grumbling in the kitchen were all speaking English, and all speaking it correctly by the standards of their own circle — but they were not speaking the same English. This chapter looks at three of the clearest registers documented in period sources: polite speech, low speech, and a handful of habits noted specifically as feminine.

8.1 Polite Speech

Literary scholar Carey McIntosh, studying eighteenth-century English style, identified a specialized vocabulary inherited from an earlier age of courtiers — the language of dependence and patronage, built around a small cluster of words:

to pray • to serve • to merit • to deserve • to oblige • to confer • to grant • to accept • to permit • obligation • service • duty • merit • interest • honor • favor • leave • will • pleasure • grace • goodness

The underlying logic was almost mathematical: an inferior offered obligation, service, duty, or merit; a superior, in response, granted honor, favor, leave, or some other desired outcome, according to their own will, pleasure, or grace. McIntosh traced this vocabulary through six recurring contexts — petitioning a superior, courtship, letters between close friends, etiquette manuals and model letters, dueling and chivalric romance, and prayer — and Virginia sources confirm that colonists reached for this language in the first four of those situations regularly, even at a distance from London society.

Petition and loyalty. Addresses to the governor, official correspondence, and any letter asserting loyalty to a superior reliably reached for this vocabulary:

I am much obliged to you for the favourable opinion you are pleased to have of me. If your Excellency should think it proper to ask me any questions, I will do myself the honour to wait on you.

Courtship. Within courtship, etiquette cast the woman as the "superior" granting or withholding her favor — a convention worth knowing even if you find its framing dated. Proposals and refusals both leaned heavily on polite vocabulary:

I beg leave to throw myself, and all that I have, at my charmer's feet, and beg she would be generous enough to smile upon so mean an offering. I have no thoughts at all of changing my situation.

Invitations, favors, and apologies. Even a casual, spoken invitation called for polite phrasing, and the habit is still recognizable in the "favour of a reply" line on modern formal invitations:

I hope to hear that you will honour us with your company some day next week. I beg pardon for breaking in upon your conversation. You do me an honor I by no means deserve.

Words of course (revisited) — As with the greetings in Chapter 2. Meetings, Partings, and Forms of Address: Meetings, Partings, and Forms of Address, polite vocabulary was often less about literal sentiment than about ritual acknowledgment. A period critic complained that these "modes of address," through sheer repetition, had "degenerate[d] into mere verbal forms" — which is exactly why a character can use them fluently without necessarily meaning every word.

Polite vocabulary can also be turned sideways into sarcasm — addressing a social inferior with exaggerated courtly language was a recognized way to needle them. "To what purpose may I owe the honour of your presence?" lands very differently spoken to a servant who's overstepped than spoken to an actual guest of honor.

8.2 Low Speech

At the opposite end of the spectrum sat what period writers bluntly called "low" speech — the everyday talk of the ungenteel and uneducated, and, for the middling sort, whatever they spoke when they weren't making an effort to sound polished. A few recurring habits show up again and again in transcriptions and literary imitations of the period:

Rambling, loosely joined clauses. Low speech piled clause onto clause with and, for, and as, rather than breaking a thought into separate sentences — a single breathless run rather than a series of tidy statements.

Money and commerce. Plain speech reached for financial comparisons even outside financial topics:

Nobody likes to fool their money away for nothing. It's a great hindrance to business, ma'am, such things.

Exaggeration. Superlatives and hyperbole did a lot of work:

She's as great a fool as ever I saw. 'Twas as fine a night as eye could wish to look at. He fell into the greatest passion ever you see.

"As to" and "as for." Unfashionable speakers flagged their topic explicitly before diving in:

As to manuring land for tobacco, we cannot say which is the best manner.

Echoing the last word. A favorite conversational tic was throwing the other speaker's key word straight back at them:

I hope, Madam, you have recovered from your fright. Fright! Why, that's not half. I'm bruised from top to toe!

Self-referential fillers. Phrases that pointed back at the speaker punctuated low speech constantly:

Fanny, I say, Fanny, don't you hear me? I thought, thinks I, he'll be so proud he'll hardly let me speak.

These habits combine well — a plain-spoken character rambling through several linked clauses, tossing in a money comparison and an exaggeration, and punctuating it all with "I say," will sound convincingly unpolished without a single archaic word.

8.3 Women's Speech

Period sources say less about specifically feminine speech patterns than about class-based ones, but a few habits were noted at the time. The adjective fine was singled out repeatedly as overused by women in both conversation and writing — fine things, fine eyes, fine sense, fine accomplishments. Diarist Philip Vickers Fithian, recording a distinctly feminine turn of phrase he'd heard in Virginia, wrote of a guest who "stays Breakfast (to speak in the phrase of Ladies)" — noting the expression as something he associated specifically with women's conversation, whether Virginian or English more broadly.

The differences between masculine and feminine speech in this period remain a thin and underexplored area of research. Treat the handful of documented habits above as light seasoning for a female character rather than a full separate dialect — there simply isn't enough surviving evidence to build much more than that.

8.4 Putting It Together

Take a single request — asking a friend for a favor — and write it three ways: once in full polite vocabulary (a petition to a superior), once in plain low speech (a rambling, money-conscious ask between equals), and once flavored lightly with a feminine habit or two. Notice how far you can shift the social meaning of an identical request just by changing register, without changing the underlying grammar rules from earlier chapters at all.