The forces of destruction draw their energy from a rather unenergetic human trait: laziness. The tendency to save effort leads speakers to take shortcuts in pronunciation, and with time the accumulated effects of such shortcuts can weaken and even flatten whole arrays of endings and thus make the structure of words much simpler. Ironically, the very same laziness is also behind the creation of new complex word structures. Through the grind of repetition, two words that often appear together can be worn down and, in the process, fuse into a single word—just think of “I’m,” “he’s,” “o’clock,”
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