Mark Liberman takes issue with the criticism Ralph Fiennes has for Twitter, in which he says our language is being “eroded” by our habitual use of “truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.” Twitter restricts posts to 140 characters, though there are several ways around that. Liberman did some word analysis and reports, “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.” He says the character restricts motivates some of us to pack the information into our tweets.

Leberman also reports on the word and sentence lengths in U.S. Presidential addresses, in which mean word length has dropped 5% in Inaugural and State of the Union addresses since George Washington’s first speeches and mean sentence length has dropped 50%.

Clearly, the presidency must go, for the sake of American English.