It is threatened by its very ubiquity. It has spread through commerce and finance and colonial effort over the whole globe, but it has not spread in any united fashion. [...] Even those accidents which help to spread the use of English (the cinema is the most obvious example) distort and weaken the tongue, and by making it too common make it less itself.*
It is threatened through the daily Press, which is almost everywhere (but not quite everywhere) concerned with something other than exactitude and purity of speech. Outlandish words are used, because they are short and fit into headlines. Set phrases are used over and over again, because hurried composition (mostly rushed through at night) falls of its own weakness into set phrases. These set phrases (of which Stevenson said that they ought all to be cast in one line of type and kept standing for perpetual use) weaken and degrade the tongue, because the essence of any language, is a subtle exactitude in the expression of emotion, and set phrases are the enemy and opposite of that.
abridged
From an essay entitled ‘The Future of English’ in ‘The Silence of the Sea’ (1941) by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953).
* Belloc may have in mind Falstaff’s remark in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 that “it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.”