Imagine a trivial circuit with battery and one resistor. To measure the "voltage drop" across the resistor, we stick a voltmeter in parallel with it. However, this means the voltmeter is also directly electrically connected to the terminals of the battery. Therefore, why doesn't it simply measure the battery voltage, regardless of the resistor?
I hypothesized that the answer is because some of the available voltage/pressure/force/power/energy/magic/whatever-it-is from the battery is being drained through the resistor, it will not be passing through the voltmeter and will therefore not be measured by it, but this still doesn't fit, because that means the voltmeter is not measuring the voltage drop; it's measuring the voltage that wasn't dropped. If the battery supplies 5 V and voltmeter reads 4 V, how is 4 V possibly the voltage drop of the resistor, when the available voltage has actually dropped by 1 V and I still seem to have a non-dropped 4 V to play with?
I guess I really do not understand what the voltage drop is supposed to mean. I don't know why the resistor is dropping voltage at all, when it is supposed to resist current. I'm so lost.