The eccentric use of a vocable, and the attendant effort to understand it, is eventually diminished until it is normalized with its normative use.
A secondary characteristic of attenuation can be expressed in the language of eccentricity or elasticity or felt crudity. Uses that would be eccentric or crude at an earlier stage of the language are banal or perhaps elegant efficiencies at a later stage. We can imagine that the earliest uses of going to (or rather its ancestral vocable) all involved motion toward. That is, there was a stage in the development of the language at which disappointed expectations of motion toward would have been sufficient evidence of a false or eccentric use. The extraction from such a use at such an early stage, of expected outcome without motion as in
I'm going to be sick
as distinct from (certain occasions of)
I'm going to buy groceries
would require a little extra neural effort. At a later stage, it takes no unusual level of effort at all; whether the use is a motional or motionless use is simply supplied by context and filling. At the latest stage, the default reading is one corresponding to no expectation of physical motion toward. Similar remarks apply to the have of
I have finished for the day.
There is no expectation of possession, only of attainment. Unlike the have of I have a table which creates expectations of possession or at least of acquisition.
This change has a neural correspondence. Put into simple terms the use of the language of elasticity can be justified on purely neural grounds. With reference to the particular example above, the eccentric, motionless use does not diminish the automaticity of expectation in later uses; after such a use the expectation is triggered as a default effect. In later stages, There is no such default state.
When a use that was eccentric is eccentric no longer, the vocable in use may be described as having lost, in some dimension or other, a degree of elasticity. As in the case of lost physical elasticity, the level of neural effort required to maintain the extended or stretched state is reduced or eliminated: the extension of the object in its stretched state has become the normal extension. The usage implies that at an earlier stage a linguistic item has had a greater degree of elasticity, and this implication requires some brief comment. This is its intended import: a commonplace word used in a commonplace way requires some baseline energy expenditure on the part of an interlocutor to play the conversational role that it has. Somewhat novel uses require expenditures of energy that are somewhat above the baseline. How far above depends upon the degree of novelty. Very minor extensions of use require sufficiently low levels of additional expenditure as to put little strain upon elasticity. Such little resistance as there is is easily overcome.
To put the matter another way, it is unclear, at a given stage in the life cycle of a linguistic construction which of its uses are normal, and which are mildly eccentric, for sufficiently mild eccentricities. That range of indeterminacy must accommodate some of the expected variation in the linguistic experience of the particular linguistic population. An earlier rest state of a linguistic item may include few instances that stray from its earliest uses; that is, the item may persist in a relatively quiescent state through many generations of users. But in radically altered circumstances, such as can be occasioned by technological innovations, sudden relatively eccentric uses can find currency. Consider, for example, the innovative application of the verb drive to the operation of a car. The drive of drive a car which is simply an extension of the drive of drive a horse or horses but involves no element of urging on. In fact someone reported as driving her horse to a rodeo would likely be engaging in an activity akin to driving her children to school, which in turn, again receives no competition from the earlier driving of driving horses to school. In this case, though one can still speak of driving horses, the vast majority of language users remain unaware of the connection when speaking or hearing of driving a car. The word "drive" has lost its elasticity, the tendency or capacity to be pulled back to its earlier set of effects in the absence of environmental cues.
Uses of vocables resemble the physical nature of elasticity in a number of respects, transitions in currency of usage can signal a radical change in the use of a vocable.
The generation of an eccentric use is akin to the action of stretching a rubber band. The successive generation of eccentric uses relaxes the use of a vocable. As an elastic band becomes easier to stretch after a few pulls, so are a vocable's eccentric uses that become increasingly less eccentric as these uses are multiplied. Eventually, however, the capacity for the elastic band to regain its initial shape is lost and so is the capacity for the vocable to regain its early use. It is at rest in a stretched state. The point at which an attenuated vocable is at rest is a point at which its attenuation is maximal and its extension can no longer include new types of instances. At this time in its lifespan a vocable will no longer change, it has reached a kind of equilibrium state. Some of its earlier uses will disappear from the language, but overall, although changing circumstances modify the extension of the vocable, it undergoes no further categorial shifts.