U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji
I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get off my lawn."_
https://newatlas.com/last-telegraph-message/28314/#:~:text=I....
Relative to wages in the 1860s, telegrams were very expensive.
https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2016/10/where-the-money-w...
That era was just starting by 1850, but showed in some language, especially in newspapers, and to an extent Mark Twain.
Hemmingway remains the exemplar though.
I strongly suspect that the ornate language also served trust and signalling purposes. With faster communications, that could be indicated by other means (returning texts immediately rather than long exhortations of faith, fearing the correct gods, and infinite gratitude to one's superiors, should one have any). This turns up in business correspondence, and the history of business writing and messaging as communications increased in speed and bandwidth are interesting. A small handful of companies (the Souther Pacific Railroad, DuPont Chemical, General Electric) had an absolutely outsized impact on standards of correspondence and recordkeeping, particularly from about 1880 -- 1910 or so. Even standardisation of fields on memos, most of which were later reflected in RFC 822 email message headers, date to this time, and were aimed at improving ease of reference and filing.
People could write unpublished books back then just as well, and people can be locked out of the publication process today. The difference is that "reasons" were given by a person and today you're locked out by an Algorithm that doesn't even tell you why.
> James Kinneavy is largely credited with reintroducing the importance of kairos into the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and, thus, the composition classroom. According to Kinneavy, kairos is “the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved”