The author proposes a functional theory of language use, which he employs in combination with some intuitively plausible causal relations to explain two language changes in German: the pejoration of Frau and earlier words referring to women and the replacement of Englisch 'angelic' by engelhaft. Language change is brought back to individual language use, and its propagation is considered to be an 'invisible hand' phenomenon, which merely means that there are strict causal events in the sequence of events resulting in a language change, which follow the speaker's intentional event.