It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
ATTRIBUTION:
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), U.S. author. “Notes on English and American Style,” The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976).
