In “Mother Tongue”, Bill Bryson excerpted some passages from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Reading them was torture. I doubt many people today could even follow what they were saying.
I’ve heard that two things led to more concise writing: the invention of the telegraph, which charged by the word; and the literature of Ernest Hemingway, whose prior work as a reporter influenced him to write briefly and clearly.
Agreed, but at the time, Lincoln’s speech was not at all considered flowery or ornate. At the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Lincoln was preceded by the noted orator Edward Everett, who gave a two-hour speech in the approved ornate, neoclassical, Latinate style. This was a time when a prestigious education meant studying Greek and Latin, and speakers were taught to model their orations on those of Cicero and Demosthenes. See, for example, the end of Everett’s address:
“But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.”
In contrast, Lincoln’s prose drew from the other great source of English prosody - the King James Bible. It was spare, lapidary, and simple. Whether it was praised or derided at the time depended on the political affiliations of the critic (a Democratic newspaper called it “the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”, while Republican papers hailed it as a gem.) But it was by no means considered flowery or erudite.
So you’re saying it’s not unusual?
It’s not just “in those days”. Up until well into the second half of the 20th century, far more time was spent in school learning grammar and syntax, diagramming sentences, and understanding the proper use of English in general than is spent now. In fact, in K-8 public schools, there are no English courses per se. So much time and money is being put into just teaching these kids how to read and do math that there is no time available.
And also, no going back for easy editing.
Indeed. But this makes it even more pointed: even “plain, direct” public speech at the time exceeds what we in ours consider “talking like the people”. That has a sociocultural part to it, too: if you had gone through the effort of educating yourself, it was NOT considered a positive selling point to still talk as if you were a yokel, in fact you trained and conditioned yourself to that end. And the voters expected it.
(And good observation about the KJV: when it was written, THAT was spare and simple, but correct, writing/speech. People grew to think KJV English is particularly solemn or courtly because with the centuries the forms became archaic and at some point they began only hearing it in church.)
TL;DR.
John McWhorter wrote an excellent book, Doing our Own Thing, about this subject. Backed up with many interesting examples, he pinpoints the change from created prose to just talkin’ in public speech (and song) to 1968 — but it’s very much relevant to your observations.
I don’t think the question should be “why was pre-modern era speech and prose so ornate?”, but rather, “why is modern speech and prose so austere?” I believe the primary answer to that question is that we are bombarded with an accelerating stream of words into our ears and eyes and flash now wins over substance.
When something is rare, care is taken to polish and cherish it. Receiving a letter or hearing a speech would be a relatively rare event in the 18th century, so recipients cherished those words and senders took time to deliver a polished product.
Compare that to the mass of words modern citizens are assaulted with each and every day. Speed and attention-getting flash takes precedence over slow-constructed substance when vying for the attention of a word-weary population.
Taking the cue from advertising, contemporaries must grab listener’s attention quickly and to-the-point, or risk losing their audience.
Which ad will sell more product to modern consumers , 19th century’s, *“Coca-Cola is a Delightful, Palatable and Healthful Beverage that Relieves Fatigue and is Indispensable for Business and Professional Men, Students, Wheelmen, Athletes. It relieves Mental and Physical Exhaustion and is the Favorite Drink for Ladies when Thirsty, Weary, Despondent” * , or 21st Century Nike’s, “Just Do It”? Modern people would die of thirst before they got to the end of the old Coke ad.
If a website doesn’t load and grab your attention within 3 seconds, you’ll “bounce” out and Google a site that grabs you in 2 seconds.
Get your breaking news out first and your viewership will increase, while the news agency that takes time to verify facts and spell-check will languish.
Presidents no longer have homey fireside chats, they Tweet.
In days gone by, words were rare and lobsters were plentiful, so even prisoners spoke well and ate lobster. Today words are cheap and lobsters are depleted, so people talk in Netspeak and take out a second mortgage for Lobster Newberg. LOL.
Yes, but “polished” doesn’t necessarily mean flowery and ornate, and it certainly doesn’t necessarily mean long and prolix.
“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” -Blaise Pascal
snort!
Heh. Anyway, while a deliberately ornate hermeneutic style has been traditional since forever for writers who choose to follow it (achieving varying degrees of success), as people have pointed out, that is the opposite of the style of the Bible, Pepys, Shakespeare, Lincoln, et al., even though what is considered popular continuously shifts.
It should be possible to give a more-or-less factual answer to what is unusual, by taking a corpus of language tagged by date and computing various complexity metrics of the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and what have you; the computer can even figure out the relevant parameters without being explicitly told. Hasn’t anyone done this? Vaguely like this, but using much more sophisticated techniques. Then we would know if something changed, and what, and when.
I don’t know if that’s generally true. Look at popular movies; running times are going over three hours. In popular fiction, we’re seeing trilogies and series. People seem to regard popular entertainment the way they regard popular food; bigger servings are better.
I think the phenomena you’re describing exist - but they exist in specific media, like YouTube videos, television ads, and news reports.
I’m baffled that you would cite this as an example of “flowery” writing. It reads to me like plain average standard mid-20th century prose. It’s closer to the style of today than it is to turgid, flowery stuff like Edward Everett or, to take an extreme example, John Ruskin:
“Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand.”
Not to derail the thread, but one reason prisoners ate lobster was because lobster was genuinely nasty back then - often unrefrigerated, half-gone-bad, with ammonia reeking already.
It’s not like they were getting fresh lobster tails with clarified butter, Old Bay spice, a wedge of lemon and napkin.
And that’s part of the reason, with communication so slow, you had to cover every base when you made the first communication. I’m finding myself doing this more and more online. I feel like I have to cover every base, make every joke first, correct every typo, when ever I start an online thread – very often here on the SDMB. You’ll see me ask a question, then answer it "Duh, Arkcon, the answer is …, then I qualify why the easy answer isn’t what I wanted. I feel if I don’t do that, I’ll just get joke answers, and the thread will derail.
Hrm. Maybe another French person from the Revolutionary War besides Lafayette. That’s why I can’t find the citation myself – I’m looking for the wrong Frenchman.
At any rate, the story goes that Washington wrote a letter saying the the Frenchman had been afflicted with the same insanity that strikes British men – they sometimes decide to get married. An insanity that only strikes once in a man’s life. Although Washington doesn’t know how things are done in France … might not be a once in a lifetime occurrence there,
Ha Ha.
As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives …
Of course, the seven wives weren’t his, but over in France, that’s how it is.
The British have been making that same joke against the French since the Middle Ages.