You Speak-a English? Or: The Longest Post In All The Land

Due to the long nature of this post I have taken the liberty of shrinking the font size. My apologies to those who must now squint to read this.
At the beginning of the week I put up the following poll question:
Which of the following phrases have I *not* misunderstood at one point or another? The options were
A) To make ends meet
B) Lbs
C) Layman's terms, and
D) Sealing wax.
I then closed the polls two days later. Now, usually I am not so on top of things and will look for any excuse to delay updating my blog, if only to prevent myself from establishing a pattern of when I post because I don't want to be held to a regular schedule (see 101 reasons post below). However, I am leaving for vacation tomorrow morning and won't be back till the 17th-ish (another example of a lack of commitment on my part). I am going to Seattle for a few days, then to island park after that but don't distract me from the point here, which is that I won't be posting for a good week and a half. So I thought I would leave you with this extra long post to keep you entertained while I am out.
Well now, shall we examine the poll question?
The first of the phrases I HAVE misunderstood is "to make ends meet." Sadly, it was only recently that I learned it was "meet" as in come together, not "meat" as in food. Thinking all this time that the phrase was "end's meat" and knowing that it meant just barely scraping by, I logistically determined that the ends of the meat must be the worst part that you would not ordinarily consume. Therefore, if you are having to make "ends meat" you are not doing well and would much rather be making pot roast. Interestingly enough, the fact that I had never come across a recipe for "ends meat" did not stop me from believing that this was the true meaning of the phrase.
Ok, now that you are done rolling on the floor with laughter, lets move on to the the next phrase that I HAVE misunderstood, which is LBS. (You may want to take a bathroom break before continuing reading.)
I have a very specific memory of when I determined the meaning of that strange abbreviation on the butter container. I was sitting in a car parking lot as a child while my mom was loading the groceries and as I looked at the butter I determined that it must mean lillibeaters. Like millimeters only bigger. Never mind the fact that there was no lillibeater measuring cup to be found anywhere on earth, I had made sense of the abbreviation and it stuck. I don't remember when I learned that lillibeaters don't actually exist and that LBS stands for pounds (now really, who decided that pounds had an L in it?!) but I do remember when my younger brother learned it. He had taken a far more logical approach to LB and determined that since he often saw it on bags of candy it MUST stand for Large Bag. So you could go to the store and ask for one Large Bag of Skittles and they would know exactly what you were talking about. At least I am not the only one in my family.
Now, the next phrase that I misunderstood was sealing wax. This really shouldn't have happened because I remember watching The Scarlet Pimpernel as a kid and seeing the man SEAL the backs of envelopes with red WAX. Foregone conclusion, right? Except that I also have a distinct memory of watching Puff the Magic Dragon and his friend Jackie Paper packing their bags with shoes and ships and CEILING WAX. Seriously they have a bottle with "ceiling wax" written on it, I swear. I would verify this by watching the show again but I'm pretty sure we don't have it anymore. Anyway, I remember being confused as to what one might do with ceiling wax but figured there must be a good use for it somewhere, and never having sealed a letter with wax myself it took many years for me to get this straightened out in my mind. I guess this is what happens when you watch too much TV.
So, the only phrase that I have never misunderstood is Layman's terms. I would pat myself on the back for this but the only reason I never misunderstood it is because I had never heard it until a high school English class. The teacher was going over funny mistakes that people had made in various term papers and one that he found entertaining was a student who had thought it was "Laman's Terms." As in whiny brother of Nephi. Yeah, that Laman. In all likelihood I would have probably made the same mistake later in life had this not been the first time I had ever heard the phrase. So if you all know of any other random expressions that you think I may not really understand please let me know before I start writing about why you would need to rotate your tires if all they do all day is rotate. (My cousin actually takes credit for that one. She thought that rotating your tires involved jacking the car up and spinning the wheels. Just in case you thought so too, it actually involves taking the tires off and moving them to different positions:)
And don't think for one second that I am done with this post. I told you it would be the longest post ever and I meant it. (Why is it so hard to write this much for term papers?) So, you may want to take a lunch break before continuing.
Ready? Ok, the reason that I thought about these misunderstandings is because of a question that Rhonda posed about the English language. Specifically she wanted to know why it breaks so many rules. Like why don't "hanger" and "danger" rhyme?
Well, lets just say that as I was researching the answers to these questions (and it was very scientific I'll have you know. I was working with the esteemed Dr. Google :) I came across enough information to write a doctoral thesis or sixty. But as we all know, I am far too lazy to do such a thing and am content with the idea that maybe someday a University somewhere will award me an honorary doctorate degree. Hey, at this point I would settle for an honorary bachelor's degree.
So, here is what I learned.
The English language as we know it began in the 500s AD when three groups of people invaded what is now known as England. They were the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. They came from Germany and Denmark and pushed the Celt speaking natives of England (would they be called native englicans?) into present day Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The invaders all spoke Germanic type languages that eventually sort of meshed together into what is known as Old English and which doesn't look anything like modern day English.
That went ok for awhile till William the conqueror, you guessed it, conquered England. His army was composed of Normans who hailed from Normania. Just kidding, they were from France. So then French got mixed in with the Germanic stuff and turned into Middle English, which is what Frodo and his hairy-toed posse speak when not chilling with the elves. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
In about 1500 something called "The Great Vowel Shift" started (seriously, that's what its called) and people started pronouncing vowels shorter and shorter. This is similar to what happened to the traditional English greeting which started out as "Hello" and rapidly deteriorated into a seizure like upward jerk of the head, sometimes accompanied by the monosyllabic "sup". (You have no idea how happy it makes me to use the word monosyllabic:)
Anyway, all this coincided with the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press which pretty much finalized English into what it is today. Obviously it is still changing with new words being invented as technology requires and also borrowing from other languages. (You'll notice we use the Japanese word sushi instead of making up one of our own, like barfy fish paste)
So all this would explain some of the confusion involved in a language that started as German, meshed with french, got gansterized and globalized and regionalized. (Y'all want some chitlins with those shrimps on the barbie? They're chillin in the boot of the lorry)
Also, as far as grammar rules go it turns out that some dork applied Latin grammar rules to English long ago, despite the fact that English is Germanic. This is what accounts for the stupid don't-end-a-sentence-with-a- preposition rule that nobody actually follows up with. Ha.
Oh, and as for the hanger/danger thing it is because danger is of Latin origin and as far as I can tell hanger is of French origin (at least, hangar is, so we'll assume hanger is too) that probably accounts for their lack of rhyming.
Gruesome side note: the expression "hanging out" stems from the practice of public hangings being a recreational activity people used to enjoy.
So. There you have it. The longest post in the history of the English language. Or maybe on the history of the English language. And now that I have answered that and stated that I still like nuts and nuts like me (Lacey) I have only one more "theoretical" question to answer involving the painting of rocks before I run out of questions. Which gets me off the hook post-wise, and which I am ok with. So send some more or don't. But definitely don't ask me how I have managed to function so far in my life because that would be the shortest post ever. I have no stinkin idea.