English to Russian Other Linguistics Journalism/Twitter

THIS past week has seen two news items on language and Twitter. In the slightly unserious category are the comments by Ralph Fiennes that Twitter is degrading the English language.

"Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," he said. [...]
"I think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English language, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant?"
The actor, who has just directed a forthcoming screen adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, has his pecuniary reasons for hoping that viewers' taste for antique syntax and rare words hasn't been eroded by Twitter. But is Twitter really so bad? At this point, one standard response is to recall how some people (Socrates, famously) opposed writing as a technology that bred lazy minds, and left words dead on the page, scroll or tablet. It's hard to find a communications technology that wasn't criticised for degrading the language.