My Thoughts On Select Language Discrepancies

    Hi. This is a bit of a weird one today, but the thought popped into my head, and I had to talk about it. The English language is odd. There's a lot of things that are left over from other languages that it's borrowed from over time that don't really fit in to the modern, refined rules that English is ordinarily supposed to follow. The "'I' before 'E'" rule, for example, is rarely followed by a lot of words we use. There are enough of these discrepancies to probably write an entire book on, but I just wanted to talk about some that I've noticed myself.

    First of all, pickles. To make pickles, you pickle them. (Wow, unexpected.) My question is why pickles are the only thing directly named after the process. Why aren't they called "pickled cucumbers?" Everything else that gets pickled is just a pickled version of the item, like "pickled peppers" or "pickled egg." There's probably a good reason for it, but I think it's just inconsistent and it bothers me.

    Next up, there are a lot of words that, when used in a more slang-y context, mean the same thing when they realistically shouldn't. For example, being "up for something" and being "down for something" mean the same thing, despite having polar opposite terms. Do you see where I'm coming from? Something that "sucks" and something that "blows" both are generally unappealing, despite the terms, again, being opposite. Anyways, that's finally off my chest. See you next time.