Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake. - Raymond Chandler

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

The next hour was three hours long

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.