This stuff is screwy, yet it's TRUE! Check it out:
You know that a telephone pole forty feet high, if it has been blown over by a windstorm and is lying flat on the ground, has to be referred to as "a telephone pole forty feet long," even though it's exactly the same telephone pole and has exactly the same measurements it had before the storm hit. You know the rule for that, and you follow it with ease. (If a Martian linguist were visiting the United States on a field trip and discovered this rule, he or she would say something like this: "Can you imagine? These people, in order to choose the correct word to describe something like a pole or a pillar, have to first take into account its orientation with respect to the horizon! Isn't that exotic?")
You know that a new candy intended for sale in the United States could be named "Jarabeek" or "Oglo," but could not be named "Szbarabeek" or "Ngoglo." You know instantly when a proposed sequence of letters could be a possible word of English and when it couldn't be; you know as soon as you see it, without having to go look in any book or consult any expert.
If someone shows you a picture of a bug you've never seen before and tell you that it's called a "wheeg," you know that a picture of two such bugs would be a picture of "two wheegs" — and you know that even though the letter at the end of "wheegs" is an S, you have to pronounce it as a Z.
If someone tells you, "I'm angry because there was so much work to do this morning and nobody lifted a finger to help me!" you know immediately that the utterance is acceptable. But suppose someone says, "There was so much work to do this morning that I was really glad everybody lifted a finger to help me!" You know that's not acceptable as ordinary English, although you might accept it as a joke or a line of poetry. You know the rules for sequences like "lift a finger" and "bat an eye" and "turn a hair."
If someone asked you to state the rule for making an English yes/no question (a question that can be answered with either "yes" or "no"), you wouldn't be able to do it. But you know that rule. I can prove that you know it just by asking you to give me an example of such a question. If you didn't know the rule, you wouldn't be able to construct the question.
"Until they become conscious, they will never rebel. Until they rebel, they will never become conscious." - George Orwell