People have been bemoaning how everything is going to the dogs since time began. Language, etiquette, decorum, morality, the quality of video games, none of it is ever going to match up to the idealised memories of years ago, when people were politer, the weather was nicer and the apples tasted better.
The best cure is to look at the chain of people bemoaning how it's always so much better (n - 50) years ago compared to today. People claim today how much better the English language was in the 1940s and 1950s, but in 1946 Orwell wrote "most people who bother with the matter at all would admit the English language is in a bad way".
But then, in 1848 August Schleicher dismissed English as the most "ground-down" of the Germanic languages. Another century or so prior, in 1780 Thomas Sheridan (father of the playwright Richard Sheridan) claimed that "the greatest improprieties [...] are to be found among people of fashion; many pronunciations, which thirty or forty years ago were confined to the vulgar, are gradually gaining ground". He estimated that English was at its most perfect during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). Jonathan Swift, in 1712, disagreed rather strongly, venting his frustration in a "Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language".
For German the chain of bitching stretches to Goethe and Schiller to Grimm ("six hundred years ago every common peasant knew [...] perfections and niceties of the German language of which the best language-teachers nowadays can no longer even dream"). For French we can follow a trail from Serge Koster to Victor Cousin and Victor Hugo to Cicero.
