I did an introduction into the basics of linguistics in secondary school and something my teacher pointed out that a rule of thumb is that common phrases or words are the most likely to break grammatical rules.

He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.

I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote

I know someone whose work is cited in the "Try and" paper, and she asked me to pass this along in response to your comment:

> Feel free to let djtango know that the paper they're looking for is Bergen (2001), "Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto". It's a minor classic and deserves any attention it gets!

I searched for the title, and this PDF was among the top matches: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf

I spent 20 minutes looking for an Esperanto reference to this but could only find pages related to "in" words [1] and profane neologisms [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms