Where the shortest words survive:
The same frugal whittling that leads us to contract can and not (though not am and not) may also affect which aspects of a language withstand the test of time and which don’t. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discovered an inverse relationship between word length and word frequency: the words we encounter most often also tend to be the shortest.
(This is often mistaken for Zipf’s Law, which describes the frequency distribution of words in a language.) Certainly most of the fixed class of English function words—including pronouns, prepositions, and articles—are both monosyllabic and extremely common. This relationship makes a lot of sense. When a word is long and clunky, it is shortened. When a word is long and clunky and said often, it is shortened quickly. Each of the clunkily named cities I’ve called home (Cincinnati, Columbus, and Champaign-Urbana) have been given nicknames (Cincy, C-bus, and Chambana) by those most at risk of having to say them.
The Dish 