Re:Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
by dredmorbius on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @01:35AM
(#28996759)
TELEGRAPHY CHANGED LANGUAGE STOP CHARGING BY WORD STOP FLOURISHES TOO COSTLY STOP
That era was just starting by 1850, but showed in some language, especially in newspapers, and to an extent Mark Twain.
Hemmingway remains the exemplar though.
I strongly suspect that the ornate language also served trust and signalling purposes. With faster communications, that could be indicated by other means (returning texts immediately rather than long exhortations of faith, fearing the correct gods, and infinite gratitude to one's superiors, should one have any). This turns up in business correspondence, and the history of business writing and messaging as communications increased in speed and bandwidth are interesting. A small handful of companies (the Souther Pacific Railroad, DuPont Chemical, General Electric) had an absolutely outsized impact on standards of correspondence and recordkeeping, particularly from about 1880 -- 1910 or so. Even standardisation of fields on memos, most of which were later reflected in RFC 822 email message headers, date to this time, and were aimed at improving ease of reference and filing.
That era was just starting by 1850, but showed in some language, especially in newspapers, and to an extent Mark Twain.
Hemmingway remains the exemplar though.
I strongly suspect that the ornate language also served trust and signalling purposes. With faster communications, that could be indicated by other means (returning texts immediately rather than long exhortations of faith, fearing the correct gods, and infinite gratitude to one's superiors, should one have any). This turns up in business correspondence, and the history of business writing and messaging as communications increased in speed and bandwidth are interesting. A small handful of companies (the Souther Pacific Railroad, DuPont Chemical, General Electric) had an absolutely outsized impact on standards of correspondence and recordkeeping, particularly from about 1880 -- 1910 or so. Even standardisation of fields on memos, most of which were later reflected in RFC 822 email message headers, date to this time, and were aimed at improving ease of reference and filing.