A quote from George Will, from the extended commentary of Ken Burns’ excellent series on the Civil War.
How the common men and women of [the Civil War era] used the English language at that time is worth pondering. I think the normally literate 19th century American had as his entertainment popular novels: Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot. They didn’t turn on the television; they weren’t in that passive receiving mode. They were in the active mode, which reading is, and popular entertainment then was popular novels. Dickens: not bad. Also, they didn’t pick up the phone when they wanted to communicate. They wrote letters. They had the discipline of expressing themselves in complete sentences and rounded paragraphs. And that’s something we’ve lost.
Mean Green Math 