The ontogenetic purpose of words is chiefly to be used as proxies in a subterranean tug-of-war between rival factions with social stake in their indiscriminately-transitive semiotic associations, until they eventually evolve into mere diegeticised simulacra of their ancestral referents and/or fall out of use as soon as they lose their laundered potency.
Competent players always maintain plausible deniability, so semiotic drift is constrained by an arms-race between inference vs laundering of ulterior motivations. In effect, this means words are pushed and pulled until they settle into a semiotic compromise determined more by the fluctuating social dynamics of the speakers than by fitness to any pragmatic purpose they might serve.
Why do you think people are so quick to sneer upon those who create new jargon with insufficient license? And why do ambitious people try? Why do you think people still write "with respect to", "ran", "because" and "between" as opposed to "wrt", "runned", "bc", and "btn"? It's hard to coordinate on new ways to say stuff, but the marginal bottleneck on rate of improvement here is not Moloch—we first have aggressive semiotic control loops via inferred/heuristic social implications to contend with.
