Although a lot of things in our culture have degraded over the last couple generations: our education levels, our attention spans, our identification with adulthood — and all of these have very systemic reasons — one thing that people commonly say has gotten worse as well is language. But it hasn't, really.
Language can't really be good or bad. Language is expressive, it exists to communicate in the current circumstances. So while the language is certainly used to express modern things that we see as objectively bad — with terms like "toxic" and "brainrot" and "adulting" being common parlance now — it isn't the language itself that's the problem.
