The words you use most are the ones that resist change the longest

In a 2007 study spanning over 200 meanings across 87 Indo-European languages, Mark Pagel and colleagues found that how often a word is used predicts how slowly it changes. High-frequency meanings like 'two' or 'I' stay nearly identical across languages separated by thousands of years, while rare ones like 'dirty' get replaced by unrelated words again and again. Frequency of use acts like natural selection on vocabulary.

— Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrew Meade, Frequency of Word-Use Predicts Rates of Lexical Evolution throughout Indo-European History — Nature, vol. 449, 2007