Linguist Valerie Fridland argues that English is not decaying, pointing to the many features now called sloppy that are centuries old. She notes that English has already lost most of the grammatical complexity it had in Old English, which was shaped by Viking, Norman French and grammarian influences. The dropped t in often faded around the fifteenth century, and the dropped l in talk followed a similar path to become standard. The dropped g in -ing words was once not stigmatised, and eighteenth-century elocution guides even rhymed words like herring and heron with -in endings. The stigma largely grew in the nineteenth century, when class mobility and usage guides made accent a marker of status. Fridland concludes that many current speech habits follow the same efficiency-driven patterns that shaped the language historically.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.