Have you ever wondered why we still say go instead of goed, even though English loves its regular past tenses? Or why selfie conquered the world in about three years while fetch from Mean Girls never happened?

Words aren't just floating around randomly in our heads. They're competing for survival in a brutal marketplace where some become linguistic millionaires and others go bankrupt within a generation. Understanding this economy helps explain why language changes the way it does—and why some of your favorite slang will outlive you while most will vanish without a trace.

Here's a pattern that linguists find endlessly fascinating: the words you use most often are the weirdest ones in your language. Think about English verbs. Regular verbs follow predictable patterns—walk, walked, walked. Easy. But the ten most common verbs? Be, have, do, say, go, get, make, know, think, take. Every single one is irregular.

This isn't a coincidence. It's frequency protection. When you use a word dozens of times daily, you memorize its exact form. Children hear went so often that they lock it in before they even learn the rule that "should" make it goed. Rare words don't get this protection. If you only hear smite once a year, your brain defaults to the regular pattern, which is why smited is slowly replacing smote.

The economics here are simple: high-frequency words have invested so much social capital that changing them would cost everyone too much mental effort. Low-frequency words haven't earned that protection, so they get regularized, merged with synonyms, or simply forgotten. Your vocabulary has a class system, and the elite words have been elite for centuries.

Takeaway

Words used constantly become memorized as whole units, making them resistant to the regularizing patterns that reshape less common vocabulary. Frequency is linguistic armor.

In 2013, almost nobody said selfie. By 2014, it was Oxford's Word of the Year. That's not gradual evolution—that's a linguistic pandemic. New words spread through social networks exactly like viruses, and understanding the mechanics helps explain why some catch fire while others fizzle.

The key is social currency. Words that make you sound current, clever, or connected have transmission advantages. When someone uses ghosting or gaslighting, they're not just communicating—they're signaling membership in a group that knows these terms. This creates pressure for others to adopt the word or risk seeming out of touch. The word spreads because using it provides social benefits beyond its literal meaning.

But here's the catch: social currency inflates. Once everyone's using a word, it stops making you sound special. This is why slang has such a short shelf life—groovy marked you as hip in 1968 and marks you as someone's grandparent today. Trendy words face a brutal cycle: spread fast, lose their edge, get abandoned by the very people who made them popular. Only words that develop genuine communicative usefulness beyond their coolness survive this boom-and-bust cycle.

Takeaway

Words spread partly because using them signals social belonging. But this same mechanism dooms most trendy vocabulary—once everyone adopts a word, it loses the social value that drove its spread.

English has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to synonyms. We can begin or start or commence. We can be happy or glad or joyful or elated. But this abundance creates competition. Languages don't like maintaining multiple words that mean exactly the same thing—it's metabolically expensive, like a city with three redundant subway lines.

So synonyms specialize or die. Begin and start have carved out slightly different territories—you'd start a car but begin a journey. Commence retreated to formal contexts. This semantic differentiation lets all three survive. But when words can't find their niche, one usually wins. Old English had werman (adult male human) competing with man. Today, only man remains.

The battlefield shapes the survivors. Words from different source languages (Old English, Latin, French) often survive because they signal different registers—ask feels casual, inquire feels formal. Words that can attach to new concepts (web acquiring its internet meaning) outlive those that can't adapt. Every word in your vocabulary earned its place by offering something its competitors couldn't quite match.

Takeaway

Synonyms rarely stay truly synonymous. Languages push similar words toward differentiation—in formality, connotation, or context—or gradually eliminate the redundancy.

Words aren't just tools we use—they're organisms navigating an environment that rewards some traits and punishes others. Frequency provides protection. Social value drives spread. Semantic territory determines survival.

Next time you notice a new word entering your vocabulary, you're watching evolution in real time. And next time you stumble over an irregular verb, remember: you're paying respect to a survivor that's been winning its competition for a thousand years.