I'm curious. Is there a specific reason why the trend for our use of the English language went towards this direction, when in the past, a lot of the historical material I read seemed intentionally verbose?
Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.
Plain English should not be confused with low literacy level. Plain English is a style that is hard to master. Only 12% of U.S. adults reach the highest PIAAC literacy proficiency levels.
"unnecessary verbosity" is just one way to express your position in the society. Wearing impractical clothes, complex etiquette, having pale skin and speaking in certain manner was something that requires either wealth or practise.
Today business jargon combined with clothes and behaviour still work today as signalling your identity. So is wearing hoodie and saying "bro" constantly. People learn to feel comfortable in the uniform and in the language they identify with.
It is also possible that certain styles of writing and clothing are felt by some to be more beautiful. It is not necessary to reduce every stylistic predilection to status or identity signalling.
> "Consider the leisurely style of British correspondent William Howard Russell in his coverage of the Battle of Balaklava in 1854.
If the exhibition
of the most brilliant valor,
of the excess of courage, and
of a daring
which would have reflected luster
on the best days of chivalry
can afford full consolation
for the disaster of today,
we can have no reason
to regret the melancholy loss
which we sustained
in a contest
with a savage and barbarian enemy.
> Not until the end of the story does Russell get to the news: Because of a mix-up in orders a 650-man cavalry brigade charged head-on into enemy guns. In a few minutes more than 100 were dead. But Russell had no reason to write an urgent story because it would take nearly three weeks for his dispatch to reach his readers by boat and train and spread news of “The Charge of the Light Brigade."
It's not that the style was unknown (Tacitus' prose was flattened compared with Cicero's) but that it wasn't expected in asynchronous long-form writing. In a different genre, compare Cooke's easily tweetable summary of Custer's 1876 command:
> "Benteen. Come On. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. P.S. Bring Packs."
It is not so much about verbosity as it is about clarity in public communication. It is not about preventing a poetic turn of phrase but about avoiding the all too common business bullshit intended to deflect blame and shift responsibility by muddling the content to near incomprehensibility.
This is especially true for late 1700s English, specifically around the time of America's founding. The entirety of the Federalist Papers could be reduced to a fraction of their original lengths with plain English without losing any of context.
Because the practice of parsing more complicated sentences, compounded over time, might instill in people the mental fortitude that translates in other areas? But yup, I get it.
Maybe in the past, written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge. Today, reading is accessible to a much broader percentage of people who may not all be as educated.
> written material was consumed by the elite, educated fraction of the population, and this was a way to "show off" their knowledge
One notes that even in letters sent home from American and Western European wars in the 19th century, the common soldiers who wrote those letters often used much more elaborate sentence structures than today, even though they were from the peasantry and had not received more than a rudimentary schooling.
Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.