Laudator Temporis Acti

K.J. Dover, "On Writing for the General Reader," The Greeks and their Legacy: Collected Papers, Vol. II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 304-313 (at 312):

Language does not enjoy in the culture of our time the status which it once had. In many past cultures the acquisition of skill in the manipulation of language and sensitivity to the linguistic skill of others have been the condition of entry to a cultural elite, which has naturally shown little inclination to subject its own criteria of value to reappraisal. The condition of entry to a modern elite is quite different, for obvious reasons: there are so many intellectually rewarding pursuits which rarely need skill in language. During the last twenty years I have known an outstandingly good mathematician who felt unable to compose more than half a page of continuous English, a postdoctoral research fellow in physics who so rarely wrote a letter that when he did his bizarre choice of formulae gave offence, and a biochemist who got what he wanted because the recipient of his application worked out that it must mean the opposite of what it actually said. When people have nothing to lose by indifference to language, they will naturally tend to be indifferent to language. Their indifference will be fortified by the observation that much can be communicated efficiently by pictures, films and diagrams which is communicated only inefficiently, if at all, by speaking and writing. Among younger people impatience with the very fact of linguistic diversity as an unwelcome obstacle to secular ecumenism is a more widespread and more potent phenomenon than the desire of comparatively small communities to maintain their own languages against the encroachment of powerful neighbours.