I have to limit what I explain because I could drone on for a while about the history of the English language. I've found just blaming the French to be the most efficient way of explaining the situation.

Most native English speakers seem barely able to spell anything but the most basic words, so I doubt anyone besides weird nerds like me spend any time looking up word etymologies. We just memorize how to spell and speak, like anyone else does. We just have the advantage of having been totally immersed in it since infancy.

I'm sure you'd be unsurprised to learn that the evolution of English pronunciation is partially responsible for the weird spellings as well. The "gh" in "light" used to make the Germanic throat noise, but now it doesn't. Writing is a lot stickier than pronunciation. Everyone learned how to spell from writing that happened before pronunciation changed, so the spelling stuck around. The same thing happened in Romance languages when they started diverging from Classical Latin.

I could go on and on, but I'll save it for my ESL coworker who enjoys having esoteric conversations about linguistics.

It's "reasonable" if you know when and where the word was picked up. For most of the weird stuff, you can blame the French. English was a regular Germanic language before 1066.

When English is regular, it's pretty easy. It just likes to throw some curve balls out there.

It's fine to ask the question, but you've already reached a conclusion despite acknowledging that you don't know the specifics.

You don't think there's a profit motive in using all the parts of slaughtered livestock?

Just a PSA.

Who's = Contraction of "Who is". Whose = Possessive form of "who".

Too late.

Push it to the limit!