Chapter 7

Polite society language practices

This chapter presents a pragmatic study on polite society language practices. Politeness, sociability, and concern for public good have been pointed out as values underpinning the late eighteenth-century culture among gentility, and it was important to recognize one’s own position in relation to others and act accordingly. Detailed assessments on how these qualities were expressed in language use are still few. The material of this study comes from the Letters to the Editor in The Gentleman’s Magazine (GM), where issues of health were debated on a broad front. The diseases that come up in the material are mostly minor discomforts and everyday nuisances, but dietary advice and first aid tips were common, too. Polite speech acts prevail; fierce debates are also encountered, but impolite speech acts are mitigated or veiled in politeness. This chapter applies an ethnographic and socio-constructivist approach to politeness as a discursive practice, focusing on people’s own notions of what was appropriate and desirable for smooth interaction in polite society. The method of analysis is qualitative and corpus-based. The GM provided a new means for literate people to keep abreast of the latest developments, and through these language practices, we have access to eighteenth-century opinions on what the polite society considered worth attention.