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Originally Posted by davetherave  you want to try reading building contracts, talk about old language 
i remember doing an exam in contract law :( |
I did a law degree and work with lawyers in the Civil Service, so I know all about verbosity and grammar...
The trend in English over the last few hundred years is to simplify; we got rid of gender, number agreement and all voices apart from the possessive and the subjunctive (which people don't know how to use properly anyway). In Victorian times, no journalist worth his port-and-brandy would write "a crowd of people watched the building burn" but rather "a vast concourse was assembled to witness a great conflagration consume the edifice". However, there is a massive difference between simplification of grammar and construction and the atrocities that are happening to the English language today.