Charles wrote:
You must have realized by now that the English language is anything but logical.

To paraphrase the learned Unspiek, Baron Bodissey : "We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the languages of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Language, as it exists now, with all its faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolutes is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men."
  

Ambulo, ergo sum!