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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

You observe the same in French. The quality of the language of people interviewed in the 40s is almost flawlessly superior to today's french literature. And every generation from there has been a step down, I don't think there is an exact cutoff. It seems to me that it affects all social classes and levels of education. I am not sure why.

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I read your comment and, though I understand the sentiment, sometimes even feeling the same myself, I don't quite agree with it.

Just think: who would be interviewed in the 40s from the previous century? Just a few, highly selected individuals. So what you have is a very biased sample.

Compare that to what we have today, and the noise is obviously much, much stronger. We are almost drowning in information, everyone can virtually host their own show, and so on and so forth.

But once you weed out the noise, and select the gems, they're still there, still shining. Our time is just that, our time. We are different, for sure, but not less qualified language wise.

Plenty of average people where interviewed for one reason or another and the difference is still generally striking. Here’s some interviews with former southern slaves for example: https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/

And even for sophisticated people, the drop is very visible. The wealth of vocabulary of XVIII french books is nothing like any modern literature.

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