To Hate or to Adhere

Why does language evolve the way that it does?

I stumbled upon a passage written about John Adams by Thomas Jefferson. Adams was a notoriously jealous and petty. He earned the nickname “His Rotundity” for being obese and arguing that everyone should refer to George Washington as “His Majesty the President.” Jefferson was a cool guy. A philosopher and statesmen that shared the opinion that most reasonable, fun loving people of the era had: Adams was a jerk. After learning that Adam’s official notes from the Treaty of Paris were “a display of his vanity, his prejudice against the French court and his venom against Dr. Franklin.” I found Jefferson’s reply interesting. He simply wrote, “[Adams] hates Franklin, he hates [John] Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere?”

This begs the questions: Why, 232 years later, do we say we hate things, but not adhere them?