The official language of Brexit promotion has if nothing else been a masterclass in sonorously noncommittal windiness – who knows to this day what the “deep and special partnership” we seek with the EU actually involves? – allied to carefully implied falsehoods, as in the promise to “take back control” of what we already had perfectly good control over. It is a ripe subject for a case study in contemporary Unspeak by some cynical saboteur intent on talking down Britain’s glorious post-EU future.
That indeed seems to be the aim of this tiny squib of a lexicon, the conceit of which is that it is written by the great Augustan lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself. So there is a sprinkling of 18th-century grammar and archaic spelling, along with invented quotations as if from Shakespeare et al. (Among its fictional characters is a certain “Sir Boris”, portrayed as a lying Shakespearean buffoon.) There is a mildly satirical tone throughout, as in the definition of “traitor”: “A person who being trusted betrays; one who disagrees in any way with Brexit”. Or “remain”: “To be left out of a greater quantity or number, as for example, 48% is left out of 100%.”
Unfortunately for any ambitions the book might have as a contribution to the understanding of public language, the example quotations from actual Brexit arguments are made up, too, and attributed to newspapers such as “The Daily Chain Mail” or characters such as “Mistress May”. With no analysis of how Brexit terms have actually been used in context, the book falls back on the kind of pseudo-antiquarian weak humour that would probably amuse Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Let us, then, turn with relief to the real Dr Johnson, who in his Dictionary defined “cant” as meaning “a particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men”, or “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms”, or “a corrupt dialect used by beggars and vagabonds”. The rhetoric of Brexit would surely have led him to exclaim that it was cant in all three senses simultaneously.
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Brexit Dictionary by Harry Eyres & George Myerson (Pushkin, £7.99). To order a copy for £6.79, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
