The Death of Elegant Prose for Linguistic Simplicity
If anyone were to confess their love in the 1800s, it would have been so through a private audience or a wax-sealed letter. In both situations, however, the words would flow deliberately to encapsulate their truest thought, and this behavior would not be limited to poets and other romantics; even the boldest of men, famously Napoleon, could not help indulging in poetical prose when talking to his wife: “Incessantly I live over in my memory your caresses, your tears, your affectionate solicitude. The charms of the incomparable Josephine kindle continually a burning and a glowing flame in my heart.”
This preference for linguistic complexity, or rather prose, didn’t extend to English alone; it did so to all languages. In India, individuals may have said: "आपसे मिलकर हमारे जीवन को सार्थकता मिली है। इस हृदय पर केवल आपका ही अधिकार है।”directly drawing from the Sanskrit philosophical concept of Sarthakta (सार्थकता), which means reaching a state of purpose, truth, or completeness. In English, the phrase directly means, "Meeting you has given my life meaning. The will of this heart belongs to only you."
Evidently, however, despite their beauty, deliberate rhetoric, and nuanced vocabulary, the romantic nature of language has faded from modern culture. The decline of linguistic complexity is not a sign of collective intellectual failure. It is a logical adaptation to the current digital culture which prioritizes instant comprehension, efficiency, and democratic accessibility over stylistic depth.
Simplification of language was necessary, quite literally so-in the 2000s, SMS text messages had a strict standard limit of 160 characters per single message, and often, companies charged per message. This created the need to shorten words. Thus, unsurprisingly, emoticons, emojis, and memes came to fruition, replacing deliberately thought-out words and sentences when it came time to express emotional nuance.
Additionally, in the modern world, most individuals actively use the internet. As a result, the priority falls upon making information globally accessible and understandable-simple as opposed to intentional.
Yet though the purpose behind the simplification of our thoughts is understandable, the loss of precision and nuance is apparent, and it makes our diction dull, a shadow of the love letters and journals of the past. After all, complex vocabulary exists to capture specific, subtle human experiences. Simplification can not help but flatten these precise meanings to make them understandable.
For instance, the first line of Shirley Jackson’s sublime work, “The Haunting of Hill House”, begins with the ever ominous, foreboding line, "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” Each word of the sentence is purposeful, specifically chosen in order to indirectly establish the eerie nature of the story. Comparing this to Twilight, which alone is listed under the genre “Popular badly written books,” opens with “I’d never given much thought to how I would die — though I’d had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this." The line is not only grammatically clunky, but the first sentence is so unimaginative and direct that the beauty is entirely lost for the sake of simplicity.
Prose and diction have, as an art form, been ignored, eroded. Language has become fully transactional; purely used as a means of communication rather than expression. This shift in purpose is a large reason as to why so much of media, including movies and novels, feels two-dimensional: due to the missing beauty of deliberate words. Simplified thoughts and actions feel false; after all, if a character in a show or movie were really pining after the other for years, would their exchanges only consist of cringe, extremely overdone flirting?
The consequences of one-dimensional writing and self-expression are actively felt; modern media feels ‘flat’ in comparison to classics such as Charlotte Brontë; older religious scripts feel far more meaningful and true than their modern counterparts; and individuals struggle to fully express themselves or feel others do not.
Of course, prose is not an art that needs to apply to everything; language connects us, and in situations where matters rely on efficiency, communicating with a concise phrase is much more practical. However, that does not mean that we must abandon poetry, prose, or any form of linguistic sophistication entirely. For instance, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy movies, in spite of being made in current times, still uphold the beauty of their written counterpart.
More pertinently, there has been a resistance towards ‘anti-intellectualism’. People deliberately dedicate time to exposure to more artful media, and the methods of expressing oneself to, hopefully, achieve a countenance or manner of speaking as beautiful and meaningful as humans did so long before. Essentially, current generations are slowly gaining the ability to speak deliberately, with each word chosen with purpose to be able to convey and articulate with clarity once more.
There is no doubt that modern culture has largely traded traditional eloquence for efficiency. Yet as the human drive for expressive nuance and beauty remains, and though we have not returned to archaic Victorian prose to express ourselves day to day, we can consciously choose to expose ourselves to, and express ourselves by, more sophisticated, complex linguistic patterns to preserve the beauty of our individual languages.
References:
- Murray, Ella, et al. “The Rise of the Intellectuals.” The Future Laboratory, 2026, app.thefuturelaboratory.com/articles/the-rise-of-the-intellectuals. Accessed 15 Oct. 2026.
