I would be interested to find out if things were that bad in the 50s or 70s. It does feel like the intro of the movie Idiocracy is happening. Even among sophisticated people, when you watch interviews or speeches of public figures from the 30s or 50s, their spoken English (but it applies to other western languages too, French for sure) was so much superior than even your typical written newspaper article today. Trump’s speeches made out of no more than a 100 distinct words are merely a dent in a downward curve.
