ABSTRACT
What changes most rapidly in a language is its vocabulary. All it takes is for some public figure to use a word that people had more or less forgotten, or to invent a new word-although that is far less usual since few people dare-, for everybody to feel the need to comment on it, and thereby increase the frequency with which it is used. Many French people will remember the words volapük, chienlit and quarteron made fashionable again by General de Gaulle, or the word remue-méninges, invented in 1965 by Louis Armand to replace brain-storming, which has virtually passed into everyday language. The mass of lexical units in use at any given time depends on the success of some of them and the balance which is set up between the known vocabulary and the vocabulary used by the community as a whole.
