Culture
The rise and fall of rationality in language
Fascinating academic paper on the change in use of language over the past ~170 years. The short (if you don’t want to read) is that starting in the 1980s and accelerating in 2007, our use of rational language with facts notably declined and the use of emotional language increased. Not surprising. I can’t wait for the partisans to jump on this expressing their fact-avoid opinions:
After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118
