Ralph Fiennes recently claimed that Twitter is eroding language:
Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.
Mark Liberman counters by charting the text of Hamlet, a number of P.G. Wodehouse stories about Jeeves, and the 100 most recent tweets from the Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper:
The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P.?G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP's tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters. … The business about word lengths is the easiest to check of the article's assertions about linguistic decay, and it's false. Trivially and transparently so, as such plaints usually are.
But Liberman does note that word and sentence length in presidential inaugurations has decreased over the years.
The Dish 