Evolution of Words

This week there was a short blurb of an article in the Science section of The New York Times on the evolution of words that I thought brought up an interesting idea. Dr. Pagel of the University of Reading in England and his colleagues conducted a study where they looked at different Indo-European languages and various words and their meanings in those languages. They found that "words that were frequently used had few cognates across the Indo-European family, while words that were used rarely had many." So, words used more often, like numbers and other very common words, take a long time to evolve because if spoken "incorrectly", it will be corrected in order to maintain an ease in communication.
I think this rule of word evolution makes sense. It's just odd thinking about a biology term in relation to how we speak!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/science/16obword.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin