The life cycle of a peeve

There's an interesting report in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal by my former Globe Ideas colleague, Christopher Shea, about a word study based on Google Books (and published in Science Scientific Reports*). The paragraph that caught my eye:

The authors even identified a universal "tipping point" in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, they either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse. The authors suggest that this may be because that stretch of decades marks the point when dictionary makers approve or disapprove new candidates for inclusion. Or perhaps it's generational turnover: Children accept or reject their parents' coinages.

The dictionary hypothesis seems unlikely to me, a confusion of cause and effect; how many people consult the dictionary for permission to add a word (or new usage) to their lexicon? But in my years as a language columnist, I often told peevers to be patient, because every innovation they hated would either disappear or become inoffensive, sooner or later. (The category that Bryan Garner calls "skunked terms" would be the outliers that remain open wounds -- because of all the devoted scab-pickers? -- far longer than the norm.)

I've often wondered why some changes attract disproportionate ire while others blend into the language without opposition. A century ago, Ambrose Bierce and his crowd were sweating the distinction between admission and admittance, proposition and proposal, necessaries and necessities -- all forgotten now. But their worrying about anxious vs. eager, try and vs. try to, and figurative literally live on. I doubt that we'll actually find out why some peeves die and others flourish, but it's going to be fun trying.

*Update 3/17: The WSJ credited the paper to Science, but Mark Liberman's post today at Language Log correctly cites Scientific Reports.