Posted by In honor of Twitter’s 5th birthday today!
1598-1940
Notice a trend here? It appears that the “sound bite” was emerging more than 70 years ago.
Since the average word has about 5 characters, Francis Bacon’s sentence length needed at least 360 characters – too long for a Tweet. In contrast, Winston Churchill’s average sentence can fit at about 120 characters – room to spare for Twitter’s limit of 140.
Adapted from R. J. Hoyle’s article “Decline of Language As a Medium of Communication,” The Journal of Irreproducible Results, pp. 134-135 (1983).
To quote R. J. Hoyle:
The decline of English as a means of communication is evident here and its eventual demise may be postulated.
The recently reported decline in the ability of students and people in many walks of life to use English in both speech and writing has been accompanied by suggestions that facility with English is of diminishing usefulness. (Time magazine, Aug. 25, 1975, “Can’t Anyone Here Speak English?”)
There’s more. The average word length, in letters, is declining over time.
The decline {letters per word} is approximately one letter per century and can be extrapolated to zero letters per word at about the year 2450.
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