The Slang Dictionary

For the origin of the other application of the word Cant, pulpit hypocrisy, we are indebted to the Spectato "Cant is by some people derived from one Andrew Cant, who, they say, was a Presbyterian minister in some illiterate part of Scotland, who, by exercise and use, had obtained the faculty, alias gift, of talking in the pulpit in such a dialect that 'tis said he was understood by none but his own congregation and not by all of them. ... George Borrow, in his Account of the Gipsies in Spain, thus eloquently concludes his second volume; speaking of the connexion of the Gipsies with Europeans, he says: -"Yet from this temporary association were produced two results; European fraud became sharpened by coming into contact with Asiatic craft; whilst European tongues, by imperceptible degrees, became recruited with various words (some of them wonderfully expressive), many of which have long been stumbling-blocks to the philologist, who, whilst stigmatizing them as words of mere vulgar invention, or of unknown origin, has been far from dreaming that a little more research or reflection would have proved their affinity to the Sclavonic, Persian, or Romaic, or perhaps to the mysterious object of his veneration, the Sanscrit, the sacred tongue of the palm-covered regions of Ind; words originally introduced into Europe by objects too miserable to occupy for a moment his lettered attention-the despised denizens of the tents of Roma.