I remember when I was young, maybe I was seven years old, I had a very strange thought about this question. My parents were always trying to get me to take the garbage out and I was very absent-minded about things that I didn’t want to do. Except one time I was alone and I thought about that word “garbage.” What a strange word. I repeated it to myself until it lost all meaning and became just a sound. Why did they specifically call it “garbage” and not “bargage” or “gargabe.” Who named it this? I had a very clear impression that what I was thinking had gone beyond what I could explain or express. At the time, I don’t think I ever asked anyone about it and I don’t think I managed to take the garbage out, either.
I didn’t exactly find an answer to this until I started to teach English and this became a real question students asked when I told them a new express or difficult vocabulary word. The responsibility of explaining the mysteries of English made me feel a little disappointed in my ability as a teacher (Now, I know there is no correlation between explaining language and teaching language). All I could say was: “That’s the way it is.” I was confronting the same question as I was learning Spanish.
At about the same time, I had found a number of resources that helped me with this interesting puzzle. Anthony Burgess wrote a few books about it. Of course, he has an interesting style which makes it entertaining to read about this very dry topic. To a new-comer, linguistics turns into alphabet soup very quickly. You should hear lawyers talking about the historical interpretation of obscure laws from the 15th Century. The minuscule details can add up and might only be interesting for specialists. In the right hands, it can create a story that connects all the gaps, answers all the questions, and teaches us things about how we think and evolve and the way we use language.
Tolkien wrote about how language contains the history of its people. If you are curious why English is so unusual check out the history of England. Here are two videos about that, don’t forget to turn the subtitles on.