Zipf's Law (see for example http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/papers/ranking/ranking.html, http://www.kornai.com/MatLing/statling.html) was formulated in the 1940's by Harvard linguistics professor George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950) as an empirical generalisation, and states that the n-th most frequent word in a language shows up with frequency 1/n.
So the most frequent two words account for 150% of the language?
Zipf made the further assumption that, the shorter a word is, the more common it is; this ties in to the more general empirical observation that 'smaller' events are commoner than 'larger' events. (http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/papers/ranking/ranking.html for other laws expressing this.) This observation is also referred to loosely as 'Zipf's Law', but is not what people outside linguistics understand by it.
However, this is only a generalization; & every language has common polysyllabic terms, because
they are useful. It doesn't mean a long term is somehow "doomed". (And as Talen says, 'If you want
Vorlin, you know where to find it.')