Historical linguistics is full of neat explanations for things, or at least I think so. When people want to know why such-and-such is, I take delight in being able to explain the history of the word over the last one to two thousand years. (This comes up a lot when I'm doing ESL with a French-speaking friend. He likes to joke that it's good to know there's usually a reason behind the chaos that is the English language, but that it's not scalable to expect all foreigners to get a PhD so the language can make sense to them!)