Such linguistic nonsenses are a lot more common than you might reasonably have hoped. Down means up. Well, okay, it means hill, but hills are upward sorts of things, aren’t they? In England there’s a range of hills called the Sussex Downs. This means that you can climb up a down. Down, as in fall down, was originally off-down, meaning off-the-hill. So if an Old Englishman fell off the top of a hill he would fall off-down. Then lazy Old Englishmen started to drop the word off. Rather than saying that they were going off-down, they just started going down. So we ended up with the perplexing
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