I'm curious why GitHub calls submissions to merge, "Pull requests."
From my understanding, git pull will pull all changes, from a remote repository, into a current working branch. Then merge those changes with FETCH_HEAD. (Git Pull)
So taking a look at git push... a push would actually push committed changes to a repository. And isn't that what you are doing with a Git repo? Submitting a "request" to merge your code? So why isn't it called a "Push request"?
The term “pull requests” comes from the distributed nature of how many open source projects organize themselves. Instead of just pushing your changes into the repository (like you would do with a centralized repository, e.g. with Subversion), you are publishing your changes separately and ask the maintainer to pull in your changes. The maintainer then can look over the changes and do said pull.