It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.)
At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective. You could imagine that the maritime world could have gone with a similar convention. But the downside is that on very rare occasions someone along the way gets confused and the doctor operates on the wrong side of the body.
The theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right", which always refer to the perspective of an actor onstage facing the audience. Then the word "stage" tells you the perspective, but you still keep the words left/right so you don't have to memorize two completely separate words.
I suppose it has to do with how many frames of reference you're juggling in a task/profession. With boats, others mentioned that wind provides its own frame, and there are separate words still for "left" and "right" in that frame.
Then there's space, where it gets even more fun, as the relevant frames - the ship, the orbit (or the "centre of gravity" of everything pulling on you) - are completely independent. That is, your orientation doesn't matter for the travel direction. Now, not only "right" and "left" are ambiguous - but also "up", "down", "forward" and "backward".
When in orbit, you have "prograde" and "retrograde" to refer to the velocity vector's direction and its opposite; if we dub that "forward" and "backward", then "radial" and "antiradial" are "down" and "up" (i.e. towards / away from the center of orbited body), and then "normal", "antinormal" for "left" and "right", which you can get from the cross product of "forward" and "up".
What matters to sailors with respect to the wind is the angle which it meets the boat or the orientation of the boat with regard to the direction of the wind. For that there are dedicated names known as the points of sail which include: close hauled, close reach, beam reach, broad reach, run, and in irons.
>But points of sail don't have any handedness, correct? I.e. they're mirrored on both sides of the wind.
The right-of-way rules in sailboat racing depend on who is on 'port tack' or 'starboard tack' (ie, they differentiate those mirrored halves). There's nothing physically special, though.
There's port/starboard tack, where the wind is coming from the port/starboard side of the vessel. It can be confusing because, for example, if a boat on a port tack tacks to port, the result is a starboard tack (once the bow crosses the direction from which the wind is blowing).
Even without the wind, the separate words help. In crew (rowed) boats, people sit backwards. And then boats are stored on racks upside-down. It can get complicated!
And for some reason half of the world have port and starboard channel markers as red and green, and the other are green and red. I don't know who's fault that is!
Windward and upwind are different in my book: windward is anything to the side of the boat opposite the main boom, whereas upwind is you draw a line perpendicular to the wind direction and anything toward the wind from that line is upwind. You could have a mark downwind of you on the windward side if you overshot the last tack before a mark.
For wind, you have “lifted” (wind shift that takes you closer to your destination) and “headed” (similar but away) when going to weather. Downwind, it’s a little different as the wind just “shifts” and you trim sails or steer to take advantage.
The convention for orbital spacecraft is that the local coordinate system has +z facing whatever it is orbiting and +x facing travel direction. Then you can refer to directions relative to the spacecraft such as "+x", "-y", etc.
The space shuttle normally orbited with it's payload bay, opposite of the landing gear facing Earth. The payload bay was +z direction. From the layperson's point of view, the shuttle orbited upside down, but from an aerospace engineer's point of view it orbited right side up and landed upside down.
>> The space shuttle normally orbited with it's payload bay, opposite of the landing gear facing Earth
That wasn't a choice. The doors had to remain open and pointing away from the earth so that the radiators could properly dissipate heat. It also, in theory, kept the most important thermal tiles pointing away from incoming space rocks.
> The doors had to remain open and pointing away from the earth
It's the opposite. The orbiter usually kept it doors pointed toward Earth and the "bottom" tiles pointed away from Earth, and orbited with its engines pointed prograde. (Upside-down and backward relative to the atmospheric flight people are familiar with)
I used to work satellite navigation for NOAA. For the GOES sats we often used Intrack (Prograde/Retrograde), Crosstrack (Normal/Anti-normal), and Radial (Towards planet/away from). I don't think anyone really referred to any directions as "plus x" or "minus y"
There are different conventions, yes. Even for the shuttle I've seen +z point in the opposite direction in some documents. I work in systems engineering so I'm less exposed to terms used in operations and more in discussions about which part of the spacecraft things are located.
Actually I work on rovers and it's a perennial debate whether to follow spacecraft convention (+z is down) or automotive convention (+z is up). Then mechanical engineers will usually follow what is intuitive on the screen (+z is forward). This is because computer graphics convention is +z facing out of the screen.
Yeah, operations is kind of where engineering's best practices go out the window for practicality haha.
We used to tilt the spacecraft when doing inclination burns so that we could get a little bit of intrack delta-v to even out our orbit. I always thought that was delightfully janky.
I’m curious, have you ever played Kerbal Space Program? Or, are you familiar with orbital mechanics for a different reason? KSP taught me about those terms and familiarized me with the concept.
> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.
I was recently involved in a case where a patient decided that their left should be called the right side during a phone consultation as that would help their doctor.
I have heard stories of patients, entirely on their own, using black markers to indicate which leg/arm was to be operated upon. Surgeons are entirely OK with this. They appreciate it. I also heard a legend of a patient who themselves marked the wrong leg. This wasn't discovered until after sedation. The procedure was canceled until everything was clarified.
When having my arm x-rayed years ago they places a small pad with an embedded metal "L" to indicate that it was my left arm. But if you place the L backwards, then they will think the image has been reversed, which just makes everything more complicated. So the L-pad needed "this side up" label.
The letter being revered is a way of indicating if the beam went from the back to front (posterior to anterior) PA or front to back, AP.
X-rays are effectively shadows and things further from the X-ray plate get more magnified. Large structures like the chest benefit from being done a certain way, like having the heart near the plate. That way it’s less magnified.
PA or AP is often a thing you see on the corner of films, indicating the technique.
The film also used to be processed in a film processor, and it was very easy to accidentally flip. This is another reason we have conventions.
The surgeon has no issue with it because it is essentially universal policy in the US (don't know about other countries but can't imagine they don't have similar) that the surgeon must, prior to sedation, mark the surgical site themselves and put their initials on it. Exceptions are made for cases where there isn't a "side" (you only have one gall bladder), or where the wound is "obvious", or for exploratory surgeries where the actual site of all injuries is not yet known.
I can add to these stories because one time I needed to overrule my doctors opinion and use a digital interface to point where the problem is. The peoblem involved X-ray.
That's a particularly strange kind of overthinking, implicitly acknowledging the medical field is complex enough to consult a professional, and yet thinking something as common and (relatively) simple as interpreting left/right from patient descriptions hasn't already been considered.
That's before even getting into the assumption of face to face orientation over a phone... is that in virtual terms, or in terms of absolute orientation, I hope they took into consideration the curvature of the Earth.
As I said elsewhere, but I think it's worth repeating here - In an effort to avoid ambiguity, I always talk to my doctor in terms of "driver's side" and "passenger side" - thus adopting the maritime approach, but in more common terms.
I just try to prepend "my". It's usually natural to do this anyway ("my left knee" e.g.) but can always be done ("I fell to my left" instead of "I fell to the left").
That's country specific, maybe you should use port and starboard.
Really though, just use _your_ left and right as most people do, because as has been mentioned, the standard is for doctors to refer to and visualise left and right from the patients perspective - so every time you do something different they have to transform, translate or clarify which increases chance of mistakes.
To whit, having learned to drive on the left, the “easy” turn that does not cross traffic is always a “left” turn to me, regardless of living in a country that drives on the right. Makes giving directions to others quite interesting.
I learned to drive in the US, but lived over 10 years in Hong Kong, and have driven in New Zealand and South Africa.
When I first moved to Hong Kong, I kept making eye contact with passengers instead of drivers when crossing the road on foot.
In New Zealand (my first experience driving on the left), I turned on my wipers (on a sunny day) the first couple of times entering a roundabout (the turn signal is on the other side of the steering wheel). Also, I couldn't resist the urge to glance over my left shoulder for oncoming traffic in my blind spot when making left-hand turns, despite the fact that traffic approaching me from there would need to be driving the wrong way down the road.
Thank goodness that the manual shift pattern and pedal layouts are kept the same between left-hand and right-hand drive models. Driving in South Africa could have been a disaster had the shift pattern been reversed.
I drove a Japanese car in NL traffic and whenever I had to downshift for turns in the first couple of hours after switching cars my right hand would slam into the door :)
No, that's what I meant, but said in a facetious way. If someone is complaining about lower right abdominal pain that could be the appendix, when lower left would not be.
> Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.
Understatement of the week... pretty much everything on a boat has a different word for it. Often for practical reasons, sometimes purely traditional reasons. It is nice because it binds one to nautical tradition leading back centuries/millenia.
One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla.
Words that refer to older things have more latin roots and are thus similar. Very newly created words also are similar because of all the english loan words. E.g computer= la computadora.
yes, it's "mlin" or "mlyn" in a number of Slavic languages, and I just looked up it's etymology in Serbian and the book says it comes from old slavic "mъlinъ" which they say comes from the Latin root "molinum"
The name of Thor's hammer "mjolnir" (as english speakers would see it) did not come through latin though, so the version of the word in germanic languages was inherited independently.
"Mjolnir" means something like "crusher" and the noun "mjol" (flour) means "having been ground up". For example, it can be combined as vetemjöl (wheat flour) or stenmjöl (ground stone or stone powder).
Meal appears to be a cognate of Old Norse "mál" ("mål", "måltid" - meal, meal time - in modern Norwegian) rather than mjol. Compare also Mehl (flour) vs Mahl (meal) in German.
In the case of cheese, I've had a long-running discussion with French extended family regarding exactly what the words refer to. Norwegian 'cheese' = 'ost', and we refer to the brown cheese produced by boiling and solidifying the left-over whey fluid from cheese production as 'brunost'; 'brown cheese'. This product is important in cultures where food security and calories are held at a premium.
My French relatives however, insist that this is not real cheese, as it is not fermented. But the Norwegian language has no such distinction -- the 'brunost' is an instance of 'mysost'; 'cheese produced from whey'. This is no less real cheese than the one you ferment from caseine.
This naturally led me down a rabbit hole of etymological investigation.
The best conclusion I've reached so far, is that the Germanic words stemming from 'kase', referring to caseine, naturally refer to cheeses that would mostly be fermented, as this is what happens with the solid caseine when you leave it around for a bit. Whereas Norwegian 'ost', stemming from 'yste', the verb for separating the caseine from the whey, makes no such distinction.
And ironically, the Latin-stemming words 'fromage', 'formagio', stem from Latin 'formicum'; something that is cast in a form. Having nothing at all to do with fermentation or even milk!
There are two conclusions here, one being that the dictionary translation of words does not capture somewhat-subtle but sometimes important distinctions between words.
The second conclusion is that my French relatives are wrong and brown cheese is in fact fromage. But not cheese, I will concede as much.
> the Germanic words stemming from 'kase', referring to caseine
Casein was not discovered before cheese was. 'kase' doesn't refer to casein. Casein, the family of proteins, is named after cheese, the milk product consisting in large part of those proteins.
And 'kase' is not a Germanic root. Fromage descends from the Latin word for "shape". 'kase' descends from the Latin word for "cheese".
> There are two conclusions here, one being that the dictionary translation of words does not capture somewhat-subtle but sometimes important distinctions between words.
This isn't right either. Tin soldiers must be cast, but they are obviously not cheese, and therefore they are also not fromage. The etymology of the word tells you nothing about its meaning.
(The conclusion is fine, but drawing it from this evidence is not -- if you translate French fromage as "cheese", you're not missing any subtle distinctions. It means cheese.)
Do you have references for the last of your claims? I thought I did a reasonably exhaustive search for a layperson, but the sources I found could certainly be wrong. My hobby searches in this area have led me to conclude that etymology isn't a hard science, and ultimately one will arrive at someone's qualified opinion about something.
The relation between 'kase' and casein is very fair; cheese production obviously predates protein chemistry. I guess what I was trying to say was that the words are related, but if 'kase' derives from Latin for 'cheese', the rabbit hole continues. Why does the French word derive from shape, if the Romans already had a word for cheese? And what did their definition of cheese include?
> Why does the French word derive from shape, if the Romans already had a word for cheese?
This is not a question that it's possible to answer. Languages change.
Why is the modern English term dog, a word of no known origin, instead of the native (still extant, but not really alive) term hound?
> Do you have references for the last of your claims? I thought I did a reasonably exhaustive search for a layperson, but the sources I found could certainly be wrong.
Assuming you're referring to the claim that the English word "cheese" (and the similar terms in other Germanic languages) is derived from an ancient borrowing of the Latin word caseus, meaning "cheese", I was not able to find any source that didn't confirm it. Wiktionary will tell you this. etymonline will tell you this. The OED will also tell you this:
> the dictionary translation of words does not capture somewhat-subtle but sometimes important distinctions between words
Good point. I have yet to see a dictionary that also provides delineation with similar-but-different words and describes the differences.
That'd be very useful for language learners, as colloquial use often eschews definition in favor of socially common convention. I.e. "That word does mean that, but you would never use it in that way"
Yes, and figuring out the differences is sometimes a challenge for English-as-second-language people. Finnish uses one word for both foot and leg, and if you want to say foot you say "leg table" (the horizontal part of the leg). Similar with hand/arm. In the other direction, Finnish has separate words for the front and back of your neck (and I don't mean just throat).
If I kick my foot on a rock, I may say something out loud about hurting my leg. That doesn't sound right to native speaker.
I'm not certain that this is exactly what you're talking about, but one of my dictionaries (Webster's New International, 1916) includes this under the entry for Authentic, which brings me great joy:
Authentic, Genuine. The prevailing sense of authentic is authoritative, trustworthy, with the implication of accordance with fact; as "confirmed both by legend and authentic record" (Froude); "assurances more or less authentic" (Wordsworth); an authentic portrait. The prevailing sense of Genuine is native, real, true (see Real), often with the implication of descent from, or correspondence to, an original source or stock; as, a genuine merino, genuine piety; "true simplicity and genuine pathos" (Wordsworth); cf (colloq.) "the genuine article" with "the real thing." Both terms are used - genuine more frequently than authentic - as opposed to spurious, counterfeit, apocryphal; as "Let them contrast their own fantastical personages ... with the authentic rustics of Burns" (Jeffrey); "What is genuine knowledge and what is its counterfeit" (J.H. Newman). The 18th century distinction between the two terms, as applied to documents - "A genuine book is that which was written by the person whose name it bears as the author of it; an authentic book is that which relates matters of fact as they really happened" (Bp. Watson) - while still often observed, is becoming obliterated in present usage; as "The criticism which thus so freely diminishes the numer of his [Giorgione's] authentic works" (W. Pater); "Some collectors frankly take the ground that they buy what pleases them, and that age and authenticity are minor considerations" (The Nation). See Real, Correct.
Webster's first dictionary was a one-man project and took 26 years. He learned 28 languages in order to research the etymologies. This New International is my favorite of the handful I own. I learned about it from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary, which I learned about here, on HN. I just re-submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635876
Here's one more entry, on synonyms of Intention:
Intention, Intent, Purpose, Design, Aim, Object, End are here compared in their general senses; for technical definitions, see defs. Intention, which often suggests little more than what one means or proposes to do, implies less settled determination than Purpose, less definite plan or prearrangment than Design, which frequently adds the implication of crafty or artful scheming; as "She had not had an intention or a thought of going home, until she had announced it to him as a settled design" (Dickens); his intentions are good; cf. to declare one's intentions; "My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die" (Tennyson); "I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a man hurrying along - to what? The creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it" (Keats); "envious commands, invented design to keep them low" (Milton); "Should he find me here, [he] would discover my name, and perhaps my designs, to the rest of the family" (Goldsmith); cf. "designing lovers" (id.). Intent is chiefly legal or poetical; as, intent to deceive, kill; "the power of a sublime intent" (Shelley). Aim emphasizes directness of purpose, Object that on which activities are focused, End that towards which they tend as their consequence or final cause; as, "to [his trust] keeps faithful with a singleness of aim" (Wordsworth); "her steadiness and courage in the pursuit of her aims" (J.R. Green); "Yet in the task of luxury of freedom I began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every book, and an object to every inquiry" (Gibbon); the object of education, a man without an object in life; "I see in part that all, as in some piece of art, is toil cooperant to an end" (Tennyson); "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever" (Westminster Catechism). See Cause, Effect, Plan, Voluntary.
You may also be interested in Garner's Modern American Usage. David Foster Wallace, in reviewing this book for Harper's, wrote "He's both a lawyer and a lexicographer (which seems a bit like being both a narcotics dealer and a DEA agent)".
Wiktionary says fromage comes from Latin for "mould", cheese might come from Proto-Indo European "to ferment, become sour" but this is contested, and ost comes from Proto-Indo European "sap"/"juice"/"broth", seen also in Latin ius="gravy"/"broth"/"soup"/"sauce".
That doesn't appear to be related. The word is not Germanic; Spanish is using the word it inherited from Latin, while English and Dutch are using the same word, borrowed from Latin.
In other words, the reason that Spanish is similar to English/Dutch here is that they borrowed the Spanish word, becoming more like Spanish. The reason Italian and French aren't similar to Spanish is that they changed while Spanish didn't.
because numbers don't matter. Just like Quebecois would not be the reference for the French language, even if it somehow outgrew the French speaking population in France
In the 90s in Colombia (perhaps all LATAM) we used "ordenador" but quickly fell out of use in favor of "computador", now only few old people occasionally call it "ordenador" in this country.
> in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different
Indeed. Spanish is my native language but I learned sailing in the US so my nautical vocabulary is all in English. I feel completely illiterate on a Spanish speaking boat.
Molino is mulino in Italian. Ancient Greek and Latin had similar words starting with mol-. Given the importance of that technology I'm not surprised that the word didn't change much. English' mill is also close to the romance languages. [1]
Port and starboard used to be "babordo" and "tribordo" in Italian but they were replaced by "sinistra" (the very word used to say "left") and "dritta".
Babord is port in Norwegian. But starboard is styrbord which makes a lot of sense because the steering board, or oar, is on the steersman's right side.
Danish as well. I didn’t see it mentioned, so I will add: that back then, a ship could not moor along the key on starboard/styrbord side. So it had to be the other side: hence the English port side.
In Spain a computer is an ordenador. Spaniards hate anglicisms. Car is coche, not carro, email is correo electronico, zipper is cremallera. Lots of others.
Do Spanish-speaking and French-speaking areas actually share a border? I thought there was a buffer zone of Catalan and Basque. I'll need to check a map.
The Spanish words carro, carreta, coche, carretilla, carrito all mean "something that has wheels on it", but the meaning keeps changing between car, horse drawn carriage, baby stroller, shopping cart, horse drawn cart or toy car between countries.
Fortunately it's easy to figure out from context and doesn't have possible misunderstandings as the Spanish word for straw.
This reminds me of the design of aircraft cockpits. Controls are deliberately designed to look and feel different so they cannot be easily confused (in itself a lesson for UI/UX design) - something which has caused aviation incidents in aircraft which have had consistently designed controls.
It's also pretty cool that a ton of sailing vocabulary has made its way into common English vernacular. I guess with the UK being the most powerful country in the world at one time (and projecting their power via their Navy) it's not too surprising.
What are some examples? I am English but I know nothing about the maritime world, so I likely know the words as slang/vernacular terms but not what they mean on a ship.
There are some we use in tech every day. The word log (as in logbook/log file) comes from a literal log that was thrown overboard to estimate the speed of the ship for navigation.
After that, there's some fun slang that's nautical. Chockablock comes from the blocks (pulleys) getting jammed on each other when multiple ropes are being worked on. "Not enough room to swing a cat" refers to the Cat o' Nine Tails which was a whip used for punishment on board ships.
Of course, I'm not even including the influx from containerisation! Helm, tiller, etc. etc.
Chockablock is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for! These days abbreviated to just 'chocka', at least if my mum is anything to go by. Thanks for your reply
Leeway: The "lee" is the area downwind of a vessel. A lee-shore is a shoreline that the wind blows on to, as opposed to a windward shore that the wind blows off. To give leeway is to allow enough room for a vessel to be blown off course by the wind and avoid danger.
Rig (noun): The mast and supporting stays on a boat. (oil rigs, "big rig" come from this I think).
Rig (verb): To put the sails up and tie on the sheets and other lines that control sails. ("Let's rig this up." == "Let's set this up.")
Posh (my favourite, though I doubt it's actually true): Port Out Starboard Home. When travelling from England to India around the tip of Africa, it was favourable to have a cabin on the port side on the way to India and starboard on the way back as it would be in the shade most of the time and a little cooler in the sun, with a view of the land.
See also: Change tack / try a different tack, right the ship, stay the course, (to be) swamped, "At a rate of knots" (very fast), keep an even keel, keel over.
I too doubt the posh etymology: If you’re sailing around the cape by definition you will have crossed the equator twice, meaning your calculation of the sun positions will change. Acronyms pronounces as words seem more a modern 20th century thing.
Wiktionary talks about posh coming from the Romani language, meaning half, in monetary terms, as in half a crown. Seems believable to me, a lot of modern terms come from traveller’s languages and argots and such. See also tory and whig.
Swedish (also picking a lot from German, of course) has the same word ("lä", and no I'm not going to try to describe the pronunciation) but our usage is wider in scope. In Swedish lä is simply "out of the wind", and not restricted to use onboard a vessel. Cool, didn't know that about English.
One I like is the phrase "the tell-tale signs", which refers to a sailing boat's tell-tales. These are small strings attached to the sails to indicate if the sail needs to be trimmed for optimal performance.
>also tell-tale, "discloser of secrets," 1540s, from tell (v.) + tale. As an adjective from 1590s. Phrase tell a tale "relate a false or exaggerated story" is from late 13c.
Is it maybe that the nautical term comes from plain English?
Quite a lot of folk etymology tries to, incorrectly, assign nautical origins to common words and phrases. I used to read a column by an etymologist that jokingly referred to this using the term CANOE - the Committee to Assign a Nautical Origin to Everything :-)
Have a read (or listen to the brilliantly read audiobook) of Master and Commander, and the subsequent series of novels by Patrick O'Brien. Apart from being entertaining historical novels, you learn a lot about naval life and terminology. Reading them I am struck by just how much nautical lingo made its way into common English usage.
Having read the _excellent_ series in English, it was amusing for me to see the movie in a Danish cinema, where the incomprehensible English maritime jargon was translated to incomprehensible Danish maritime jargon.
I'd also recommend watching The Terror (season 1) and play Return of the Obra Dinn. Though both contain fantasy elements, there's lots of nautical lore to be found.
I'm not sure that is true, sure the tacking angle of old boat was nowhere close to modern boats, but I would be surprised if they couldnt sail up wind.
You never sail at 0 degrees upwind. When going upwind, the angle is about 30 degrees minimum. Closer than that and you can't inflate the main sail, thus get no power.
30 degrees should be enough to prevent toxic hazards. Sitting on the head on a tilting ship, during upwind sailing, is prone to other hazards though.
To go upwind you need a keel (viking ships did) or something that prevents the wind to push the ship away [1]. Sailing against the wind was very important for battle ships. What we have now compared to them is better materials and centuries of improved design which turned into tacking closer to the wind and much better maneuverability. We can change direction in a very short space. However our sailing boats are much smaller, closer to the viking ships than to the galleons [2]
It's interesting that farming/agriculture and sailing both have left the legacy of their words into the language. It goes to show how important these industries are to civilization.
3 sheets to the wind — meaning drunk — comes from sailing. A sheet is a rope used to control a sail. Sheets that are “to the wind” are loose (rather than tied down) so a ship with 3 sheets to the wind is going to be completely out of control and at the mercy of the wind, wandering all over the sea like a drunk person!
A truly huge number of nautical terms have entered normal parlance. Some are so deeply engrained that we don't even realize they were originally nautical metaphors. Examples:
* Taken aback
* Above board
* Adrift or at sea
* Afloat versus underwater
* Ahead
* All hands
* Anchored
* Awash
* Batten down the hatches
* Bitter end
* Boiler room
* Buoyed up
* By and large
I stopped after B. Also, "cut of your jib", of course.
In Malaysian/Singaporean English there's a term: gostan (read "go stun"), which means to reverse. I was curious about it's etymology and went to research it. It came from "go astern", with "astern" being the back of a ship. I imagine this must be a phrase the English speaking colonists must have used quite a lot in the 17th century
To add to the list, strike (as in to refuse to work as a protest). In nautical terminology, to "strike" something is to lower it- sailors demanding better conditions or higher pay would lower their ship's sails and refuse to go to sea.
"at the helm" seems like common usage to me. Maybe not in the top 100 idioms, but everyone knows what you mean.
"tiller" is just the thing that controls the position of the rudder, which I think most people know about. (That said, nobody in aviation calls their rudder pedals the "tiller", so it might be a strictly nautical term.)
Yup, you're exactly right. I totally forgot about that. Thinking about it more, the rudder and tiller might be different things on ships too; I think a rudder you turn right to go right, and a tiller you turn left to go right, because of where the pivot point is?
On a boat the rudder is technically the blade that cuts through the water and the tiller is the thing that gives you enough leverage to apply force to control the direction of the rudder as it passes through the water; sometimes quite a lot of force is needed! Only quite small boats have tillers that you can directly manipulate. Larger boats typically have a wheel which controls hydraulic rams which manipulate the ‘tiller’
I hear people use "at the helm" and "change tack" to mean being in charge of something and changing direction or approach, respectively. People also "hitch themselves" to things, although I'm not sure that comes directly from the nautical usage.
A "hitch" knot is typically used to fasten around a fixed object. So you might use a hitch to tie the boat to the shore, or tie a line around a wooden (or these days aluminium or carbon fibre) boom. I'm not sure if it's purely nautical.
Boats are noisy and dangerous places at times, I wonder if the lexicon arose organically or intentionally on the ability to hear them clearly to avoid misunderstanding. Any pirates care to comment?
And dentists talking about tooth faces have buccal (cheek-side), lingual (tongue side), occlusal (chewing surface), mesial (side closest to center), and distal (the other side from mesial).
the thing that's tricky is basal/apical can be different directions: i.e. the base of the lung is at the bottom, the base of the left ventricle (in the heart) at the top. You have to know the shape of the organ to know. There's also cranial/caudal, axial/coronal/sagittal just off the top of my head
In the skiing and mountaineering world we use climbers (sometimes “lookers”) right/left or skiers right/left to differentiate when facing uphill or downhill. I find having both is helpful instead of just having a single standardized one.
For example, if you are standing and looking at a mountain, it’s easier to say “just to the climbers left of that peak” because it’s on the left from your perspective, likewise when descending it best to say “stay to the skiers left of the rock”.
There’s also lots of times it’s good to mix and match, like if you are looking at and discussing a mountain from afar and planning on skiing down it later, you might keep the conversation from a skiers perspective.
And in general hiking, referring to streams and rivers one may follow or cross, there are the "true left" and "true right" banks of the stream. Meaning, left or right looking the way the water is flowing: downstream.
"East bank" and "west bank" are also used for the sides of a watercourse that flows generally north/south, even for bits of it that are flowing east/west or have curved around to flow south/north. Which is why West St. Paul (Minnesota) is directly south of St. Paul proper -- it's on the "west bank" of the Mississippi, while St. Paul is on the "east bank".
(Same story, mutadis mutandis, for "north bank" and "south bank" of generally east/west-flowing rivers.)
In French, starboard and port are "tribord" (same etymology as "starboard", through Dutch) and "bâbord" ("back (of the oarman) board").
On stage, they are "côté cour" and "côté jardin" because the "Comédie-Française" theatre during the 1770 was in the Tuileries palace, and the stage was oriented with the Louvre courtyard on its right, and the Tuileries garden on its left.
In German it’s Steuerbord (meaning the same as starboard) and Backbord (compare Middle Low German ba(c)kbōrt and Dutch bakboort; oldest mention of this form is from old English: bæcbord!)
The word ‘back’ in German meaning ‘back’ in English doesn’t even exist. Only in this one loanword from Low German.
Only today I looked up this word, I never knew or understood that Backbord is literally backboard.
In English, there's an archaic "larboard" meaning "port side". My understanding is that this word was intentionally banished due to confusion originating from the sound being so similar to "starboard".
Makes good sense. Imagine trying to scream that to someone at night in a storm after you've both had a ration of rum.
Probably a non-trivial number of people were hurt or killed because of that linguistic similarity; we see the same with air traffic control and pilots using ambiguous language.
> because the "Comédie-Française" theatre during the 1770 was in the Tuileries palace, and the stage was oriented with the Louvre courtyard on its right, and the Tuileries garden on its left
> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective
In (musical) theatre we do it the other way around. The we call it "stage left" and "stage right" or "SL and SR" since we use abbreviations everywhere in our notes. It's always from the "stage manager's perspective" which is traditionally (but not always) facing the audience.
If the stage manager is facing a different way that doesn't affect the meaning of left/right.
It's from their perspective because they are basically the only person who isn't running around like a chook with their head cut off (because their eyes are glued to the script and video screens - https://youtu.be/DP2QOmN57iU?t=82).
In the automotive trade, a vehicle has a "driver's side" and "passenger side". This only partly solves the ambiguity, because of course some countries drive on the left.
I thought it would be difficult when I bought a car in Australia to manage shifting with my left hand, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. I had been under the impression for some reason that the clutch would be controlled with the right foot. Thank God the pedals are in the same places.
Yeah, it's a relief to discover that the driver's cockpit (for lack of a better term) is just moved side-to-side wholesale and not flipped -- EXCEPT for the shifter, which remains in the middle.
I was surprised how easily my body got used to left-hand shifting, but I will say this: I've been driving stick shifts for nearly 40 years, and never miss a gear in the US. However, driving in the UK I find that left hand is NOWHERE NEARLY AS GOOD at distinguishing 1st from 3rd as my right is. Muscle memory!
Steering-column manual shifting (e.g. "three on the tree") is pretty much extinct today, but I assume that the "move the whole driver section over" thing means that column-shifted manuals in the UK were still shifted with the right hand. Does anyone know?
Sibling comment mentions indicators and wipers being switched.
Anecdote 1) In NZ I saw a car in the middle of a busy roundabout, wipers on, passengers visibly confused and crying.
Anecdote 2) A kayak guide also mentioned, that if you see someone entering a roundabout, windshield wiping, on a sunny day, you just wait and let them do their thing.
Anecdote 3) After a month in NZ I came back to Germany and actually muscle memory let me to use wipers instead of indicators on the autobahn when changing lanes. Oof.
As a speaker of a Right-To-Left language, I see this all the time in software. Some software change the UI direction when switching to Hebrew, some don't. And culturally, it seems that Arabic users _do_ prefer the UI to be switched, but Hebrew users do not.
The wiper thing is marque dependent, even within countries. I live in East Africa, drive on the left. German cars (I've driven a few) seem to have wiper stalks on the right and indicator control on the left. Toyotas (and I guess other Japanese cars) I've driven have it on the opposite side. Whenever I drive a friend's car, I always hit the wipers a few times at the beginning of a trip before I acclimatize.
And it's not always reversed! Australian-made and Japanese-made cars tend to have indicator on the right stalk, and wipers on the left. European cars tend to have indicators on the left stalk, and wipers on the right. But not always!
Case in point: my wife and I live in Australia (have done so all our lives), and my wife had a 2008 Ford Focus, made in South Africa (a RHD country). Indicator stalk was on the left, wiper on the right (aka "European" style). She then upgraded to a 2020 Ford Focus, made in Germany (it's the wagon model), and the wiper is on the left, indicator on the right. Which confuses me, as I drive a BMW, which has indicators on the left and wipers on the right.
Blinkers were always on the outside when most cars had manual transmissions, the opposite would be very inconvenient (and still is).
Then somehow Britain didn't challenge the EU regulation that indicators must be on the left regardless of the driving side.
Japanese and Korean cars still supply right-hand indicatored-cars to Japan, Australia and New Zealand, yet left-indicatored to the UK, go figure, European ones don't give a shit, so buyers of BMWs and MBs suffer (or enjoy?) being incompatible with the rest.
The indicator should be on the outside, so you can change gear (in a manual transmission car) and indicate at the same time. It's just common sense.
I am used to the indicators on the left though when driving my BMW, so I experience the classic "wipers instead of indicators" dance many times when I drive my wife's car. As most cars nowadays are automatics, I guess this reasoning is falling out of relevance more and more.
I also want to note that not all Australian built cars had wipers on the left and indicators on the right – many GM Holden models like the Kingswood and early Commodore models from the 1980s had them both on the one stalk – that stalk being on the right of course.
Coming from the UK to Aus / NZ I was feeling smug ;) - but of course, this caught me out.
To be clear in the UK the wheel is on the right but the indicator is still on the left side of the wheel as in a European LHD car, just to keep things different.
It's not a UK thing (which side the indicator stem is), it's a manufacturer thing.
Like position of reverse gear on a H-style gear stick, some left-and-up, some right-and-down; some with a collar interlock, some with a button, some you push the whole stick down towards the ground ...
In the UK I was taught off-side and near side which referred to the sides nearest and away from the kerb as you are driving. That would be localised to which side of the road your location drives on, but not affected by left or right hand drive.
I still use is when checking tyre pressures for example, they are handy and unambiguous acronyms. For example Off Side Front ( OSF ) would be the drivers side front mostly.
An interesting thing to note is how this affects the control sticks on a car.
Generally the indicators will be operated with the hand that's furthest from the centre so that you can change gear in a manual car and turn the indicators on at the same time.
Australia, Japan, New Zealand amongst others all operate their indicators with the right hand. Not in the UK though.
Even though we drive on the left our indicators swapped to match other EU[0] countries that drive on the right sometime in the 1980s.
I drive a manual car and you just get used to doing both with the same hand. All done via subconscious muscle memory.
In fact I never really gave it much though until going round a corner in an automatic hire car in Christchurch, New Zealand. Wipers scraping across a dry screen, my hand desperately hunting for the missing gear stick as other cars hooted at me...
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0. Let's just ignore elephant in the room for now.
It's a whole lot of weirdness, especially since most interactions in English language on the internet will be with either US or UK people.
Sometimes, you want to use passenger/driver side: for example, on my car, brake flushing procedure is always rear passenger first, no matter driving side.
And sometime you want to use left/right, which is always assumed to be according to the driver's position (so it's reversed when facing the engine), because some things aren't reversed, no matter the driving side: for example, on my car, the BCM and hood latch are always on the right side (which makes it inconvenient to open the hood for a left-side driving car).
P.S.: how do I know for certain? A friend has the exact same model but with opposite driving position because it's a UK import.
Commonly referred to as "offside" and "nearside"; terms I find confusing. I think the nearside is the side near the edge of the road, and the offside is the side near the center of the road.
If you're giving directions to somebody driving, like when reversing into a tricky spot, you can tell them to "turn driver" or "turn passenger" so there's no ambiguity.
Depends. Are you referring to the rotation of the wheel or of the car? While I've never heard it used before, the post to which you're replying avoids that ambiguity.
I'm referring to the rotation of the wheel. But there is no ambiguity - when the wheel is rotated counter clockwise the vehicle turns (as viewed from above) counter clockwise. That is not coincidence - it is very intuitive to use.
There's also the approach taken in some Australian native languages, e.g. [1], where they use absolute directions instead of relative directions, so they would call what we call the port side of a boat the north side if the boat was heading east, and call it the west side if the boat was heading north.
FWIW, if you read the literature closely, Kuuk Thaayorre is also mixed. They have words for left and right and use them to describe relative orientation, notwithstanding the emphasis on cardinal directions. A related language, Guugu Yimithirr, does seem to completely lack use of left and right to describe spatial orientation; it has the words--similar to Kuuk Thaayorre, words identifying left and right hand/arm--but it doesn't extend them figuratively as Kuuk Thaayorre does. (They both extend other body-related orientation terminology, e.g. to describe being ahead or behind something or someone.) However, Guugo Yimithirr seems to heavily rely on hand and body gestures to help establish relative orientation of the subject or object. Reading the literature, I don't think Guugo Yimithirr would be capable of adequately conveying direction and orientation over the telephone.
Alot of the literature also makes hay about these language speakers having preternatural skills at maintaining a cardinal orientation mentally. I don't doubt they're good at it, but I suspect that that skill is something that has only recently become uncommon in the industrialized world. As a kid growing up in the U.S., being able to keep track of cardinal orientation was something I understood as a skill expected of men, and not by tracking the sun or consciously using other obvious markers. It was quite obviously a vestigial gendered skill at that point--noteworthy if you had any proficiency at it--but clearly one within recent memory of male adults. Moreover, AFAIU, there's also research showing that Americans tend to use cardinal directions and navigation more than many European countries, presumably related to our lived geography.
Interestingly, the literature on Guugu Yimithirr says that cardinal orientation accuracy relative to the Earth is much better the further away the described location. For descriptions closer to home (i.e. the central city/village of the group), accuracy was often off by 30+ degrees, seemingly because cardinal orientation is more dominated by familiar local topographic features. Moreover, IIRC, it seems cardinal direction isn't absolute in these languages. Which, at least intuitively, makes alot of sense to me. For example, the Bay Area is askew; when giving directions "north" is closer to north-west (middle peninsula, East Bay) or north-by-north-west (city), but everybody (conscious or not) is very consistent about the rotation and bending.
> Alot of the literature also makes hay about these language speakers having preternatural skills at maintaining a cardinal orientation mentally.
Wahern is referring to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[0] (Linguistic Relativity). I do find that this is also often misunderstood. I'm in your camp about the directions. I've always viewed linguistic relativity as just saying that your language is a framework. It should be relatively obvious that if you use something a lot that you'll be good at it. You'll find that mountaineers, sailors, and pilots are better than most at of the population because they use cardinal directions a lot. It is experimentally provable that you can make your brain prioritize rather arbitrary things. For example, get a watch and set it to beep every hour. You'll probably get a better sense of time (especially if you can get different tones for 15 minute intervals). So what I'm saying is that the weak Sapir-Whorf is well recognized (what we discussed) but very few realistically believe the strong Sapir-Whorf.
But either way, if anyone reading these comments hasn't been interested in languages before I promise you that they are a lot cooler than you imagine. Far from just communication (which is rather incredible in the first place) and if you're interested in LLMs you should learn a minimal amount of linguistics.
Maybe in the US and other places that have a grid system as their main road planning principle and route naming principle? In Europe, where roads tend to follow the terrain more, I've not really heard this.
The US doesn't really have a (consistent) grid system outside of cities, with the notable exception of Utah (due to planning efforts by the Mormon pioneers). And even in cities it can be a mess. For example Seattle grew from three different smaller areas that all planned their roads to be parallel to the coast. The problem is the coast isn't in a straight line so as they grew and combined into a single city it created a lot of awkward intersections where the roads meet.
Much of the inner US was divided by the Homestead Acts of the 1860's into square mile (640 acre) sections, 160 acre quarters, and then further into forty's. cf "back forty". These are all square.
You can just look at a map over the US and see quickly how the grid pattern exists at almost any zoom level. You also notice it in how people think about directions. As a European I found it tricky to deal with but I saw the opposite when Americans drive in Europe. They really struggle with a system not built around thinking east-west and north-south.
I think generally in Europe people think in terms of landmarks rather than fixed directions.
? I'm not talking about the suburbs of Seattle, check out maps of rural areas of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, Nebraska, or even the plains in the east of Washington state, most of the rural roads are running primarily North/South or East/West. Not that it's a grid system as in Manhattan, but it is following a grid pattern, and the names of the routes on signs and in spoken language are like "380 West" "215 North", etc. In the interstate system and many state road systems, this is reinforced by numbering convention that East/West roads are numbered even, while North/South roads are numbered odd. None of that exists in Europe.
Actually I reca reading some interesting studies where they found that children from these tribes even after turned around blindfolded could readily point out absolute directions. I don't recall reading an explanation, but they did seem to have a better inherent way of orient themselves absolutely.
The German theatre world developed the opposite convention, “Bühne links” (literally "stage left”) means left from the perspective of the audience.
I don’t know so much about the theatre world, I’m a professional dancer, but at least the dance scene is increasingly international, switching fluently between English or German depending on the people present; some people learned the English/international convention, some - especially older - directors know mainly the German convention, some people are not aware that there are different conventions in English and German and the result is complete chaos.
If you're inside a ship, it's often hard to say what way around you are: "left" and "right" have utility for the perspective of a person onboard. Port and starboard are the onboard equivalent of North/South/East/West when walking on land, especially if you're inside a building with no windows for external reference.
This is unlike for a doctor, where it's obvious which side is which: you can see the patient.
> This is unlike for a doctor, where it's obvious which side is which: you can see the patient.
This isn’t always true and it’s not always obvious.
For example with imaging - axial slices of the patient through symmetrical structures. The brain, lower abdo, a single leg or arm etc, etc. There are conventions in image display for a reason - it is not obvious.
For axial slices, as an observer, you are positioned as though at the foot of the patient’s bed. Your right is the patients left.
Latin: sinister and dexter, I think they are used for parts of organs (eg liver); one source notes occulus sinister being used in the abbreviation OS for left eye.
Greek dexios and aristeros ... well dexter come from dexios", as does the chemical suffix -dextrin. Aristeros* is a euphemism, it means something like "best" (I wonder if that's the origin of 'put your best foot forward') ... I'm told that left-sided things were unlucky to the Greek speaking peoples and Greek language apparently compensated by describing that position positively.
The "left-side are unlucky" thing affects the Latin example as well as the Greek, at the very least in the way that English derived words get used: compare "dexterous" (modern English connotations of "able, agile") versus "sinister" (modern English connotations of "evil, subversive").
It's an interestingly deep rabbit hole in language etymology just how much "left" gets besmirched and "right" gets positive connotations. (The fact that "right" is also a synonym in English for "correct" being another bit of evidence.)
I don't know, when you're talking about "the right arm", it seems obvious that it's the patient's right arm and not the arm that you see on your right when you're looking at the patient. I don't think you need to go to medical school to understand that.
You're right that "the left lung" should obviously be the lung on the patient's left. However, can you look at the image below and immediately identify which is the "left" lung?
I think I can, maybe. However I’m a radiographer and pictures like this are my job.
The orientation is screwed up and images should almost never be displayed like this.
If the patient’s organs are in non-standard locations (situs inversus, dextrocardia etc), something very bad will happen when orientations are messed with. Use standard orientations and label the images.
I fully agree with you. I was mostly posting as an example that "left is the patient's left" is not sufficient without other standards (like image orientation).
...you just expect random readers to know how lung looks on (i assume) MRI, from (I assume) top ?
I'd also assume it would be simple to spot just because the image is always took from the same direction so the narrow part points out to front/back of the patient
It just seems like an old convention that has stuck, seem'm much simpler to anyone not familiar with ships to say 'ships left' or 'ships right' than to have new words. We don't do this with cars. You have a left rear door, not a port rear door.
> We don't do this with cars. You have a left rear door, not a port rear door.
“Driver side rear door” or “passenger side rear door” are pretty common, at least in the US and UK, where they mean the opposite.
“Nearside“ (passenger side nearest curb in a right-hand drive vehicle driving on the left) and “offside” (driver side furthest from curb) are also used in the UK.
If you ever went 4x4 driving, you use driver / passenger to indicate the direction someone has to go to. This is because the navigation often is done from someone standing outside the car, where using left/right can be rather confusing.
In UK a [experienced, older?] driver gives another driver instructions with "right hand down" and "left hand down". That is, you give directions to move the steering wheel.
I've the vaguest recollection that sailing/steam boats used to say which side to move the wheel towards to steer; that begging opposite of the way the boat will go??
For repair instructions this actually causes a lot of confusion for someone in a right hand drive market. Half the time the repair instruction gets it wrong and would have been better saying left or right. Occasionally it is correct though if dealing with a part that's different in each market.
I don’t know how widespread this is but I don’t do this for the very reason you bring up with differences between countries, I drive in both the UK and Canada most years.
Cars are small and for the most part everyone in the car faces the same direction as the car itself. When you have a ship, you have 3 frames of references to contend with (self, ship, cardinal)
Four, actually. You also have the wind frame of reference, which is actually the most important (for sail boats). You don't turn left or right, you turn upwind or downwind.
I'm not familiar with sail vocabulary in English, but in Portuguese there is only downwind (sotavento) and upwind (barlavento). Functionally you don't need the other two, so I imagine it's similar in English.
I guess some could argue that we do have some special vocabulary for cars too.
E.g. you don't call it the front/back door, you call it the bonnet/boot (or maybe hood/trunk depending where you're from) though that probably is stretching the definition of a door a little bit... but then you also have nearside and offside for passengers/drivers side, though that's probably a bit more of a technical term.
> though that probably is stretching the definition of a door a little bit...
It is, but then so is the stupid "3-door" / "5-door" / etc. car classification, which is really 2-door / 4-door / etc. with the trunk being counted as additional door for some reason.
Yup. Port and starboard, along with forward and aft are in reference to the center-line of the ship from the perspective of being aft and looking forward. Looking at a top down of the ship from where forward and the forecastle are up, it is left (port) and right (starboard).
In one of Tim Snyders Yale lectures on Ukrainian history, goes overboard about the left bank/right bank in respect of the Dniepro. The river runs north to south, so the right bank is basically the west. I strongly suspect he has trouble telling his left from his right; I've read an essay in which there is a map with a small patch of Russia (coloured red) in the bottom-left, but the caption says it's bottom-right.
I suspect the reason he made a meal of this subject (and the reason he insists on using the left/right terminology) is because he finds it challenging.
I learned it with the Seine, in Paris: the left bank is to the south of the right bank. It's also where the bulk of the 1968 political protest happened; the protestors were leftists. The Seine generally flows south to north, emptying into the English Channel.
In Germany it's just direction "a" (kilometrage increasing) and direction "b" (kilometrage decreasing), though I think that usage isn't quite as prominent as Up/Down is in the UK and UK-influenced countries. In Romania AFAIK they're calling them direction "X" and direction "Y" instead.
Tides coming in is normal, but there are rivers that change direction for other reasons. The Chicago River and the Mississippi can change direction due to storm surges, for example (for the Chicago River, that temporarily returns it to its flow direction, into Lake Michigan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River#Course))
“As the monsoon rain begins, the water level of the river begins to rise. As the water level continues to rise, the flow of the river reverses. The water level of the Tonlé Sap increases by about 10 metres (33 ft), the flow of the Mekong gradually decreases at the end of the rainy season, and the flow of the Tonlé Sap then reverses and began to replenish the flow of the Mekong.”
Even where it happens (it's common, the cases I know personally are Nantes or Antwerp) it's still obvious which side is right and which side is left, it's simply according to the main flow of the river.
Although in this instance, I think it's more common to talk about north/island/south in Nantes rather than left/right banks. While Antwerp's part on the left bank is literally called "left bank" (Linkeroever).
The Thames is tidal in London so the water does 'flow' both ways, but I'm fairly sure you'd say it flows towards the river but London is on a tidal section.
Which makes for some very confusing situations when the river is twisty. There are different places in New Orleans where the West Bank is south of you, west of you, and east of you.
That's exactly because they didn't follow the convention. If they called it the Right Bank, it would always be clear which side that was if you could identify the flow of the river.
In medicine there is one obviously very important perspective, and in theatre two. But mariners still need words for relative left and right directions all around them, like "the preferred channel is to the left of the buoy" (the channel and the buoy don't have port or starboard sides, and it wouldn't be useful to communicate about their relative angle as seen by the boat's crew).
>like "the preferred channel is to the left of the buoy"
While this is true, we (at least in England) would normally say "leave the buoy to starboard" (though when racing we'd call it a 'mark' rather than a buoy). Perhaps it's habit, I'm not sure, but it's generally unambiguous.
Outdoor recreation often uses climbers left/right and skiers left/right (even when there's no rock or snow) to orient direction relative to slope, which is similarly descriptive and clear to those who haven't heard the terms before.
Except for rivers, where True Left and True Right are commonly used in New Zealand for hiking and kayaking, and I can never remember which way round they go!
And sometimes you get Prompt Side and Opposite Prompt, which are _usually_ stage left and stage right respectively, but it depends on the theatre, with some having the prompt on the stage right.
"Skier's left/right" for snow skiing. Ambiguity arises when looking uphill or downhill.
When riding on a float in Mardi Gras in New Orleans. You might be on the "driver's side" or "passenger's side". You could also be on the neutral ground side (left) or the other side. Or the rider could be on the "lake side" (left) or the river side (right). Parades run South to North and the Mississippi River would be on the rider's right and Lake Pontchartrain on the left.
Aviation uses a clock face (traffic is at your 2'oclock, northbound) to reference traffic at the pilot's right / front.
> "Skier's left/right" for snow skiing. Ambiguity arises when looking uphill or downhill.
But what about “snowboarder’s left”… sounds a lot like “starboard’s left” at which everybody on the fake ski slope on the cruise ship gets incredibly confused? We have to drive out all ambiguity here, or people are doing to die.
I also really like the theatrical world’s convention of “upstage” (further from the audience) and “downstage” (closer to the audience) - disambiguating the front and back of a stage.
Afaik, this is not the case in all other languages to have specific nautical terms for sides. I asked a sailor friend for the terminology in our language and it's just left side and right side/flank, seems pretty self explanatory, by convention you are orienting forwards. Like any profession though, having specific terminology helps distinguish from the outside group and maintain impression of expertise.
On a big ship, like an aircraft carrier or cruiser, you can qite easily lose track of which direction is the prow (front). Many carrier crew rarely go up on deck. And if the ship happens to be sailing astern, left and right become ambiguous.
> you can qite easily lose track of which direction is the prow
If you don't where the prow is, how do you know where starboard is? I guess if the sailing direction is backwards, it might be confusing if you say "to your left", but if you say "left side", it should still be clear I think, maybe not.
The advantage of using separate words for the frame of reference of the boat is that you can still use left and right with their normal meanings as well.
"I'm on the left side of the boat, and hold an apple in my left hand." The boat has a clearly distinguishable bow and stern, so it provides a frame of reference.
"Left side of the boat" is a lot more syllables than "port". And using different words makes it less likely that the listener will be confused by multiple uses of the same word to mean different things.
As I was reading your comment I was thinking "huh, that's interesting." But then I remembered: surfers use left/right as well, for instance if a wave breaks right or left. They use the perspective of being in the ocean and looking back at the shore, as opposed to the shore looking out to the ocean. I remember asking that very question when I first started.
French (maybe its in english too actually, natives could comment) say rive gauche and rive droit for which bank of the river or lake we talk about. Always taken from perspective of river flowing downhill. Makes sense, just takes some time getting used to when coming from language which doesnt obsess about it that much
Left and Right didn't have their modern meaning back then. In Old English riht meant straight, as in direct or not bent. It later assumed the meaning of correct as in right and wrong. Lyft meant weak. Their reference to handedness seems to have been incidental. It seems odd to us to talk about the 'straight' and 'weak' hand, but to them it made sense, but maybe not to talk about the 'straight' or 'weak' sides of a boat.
The concept of left and right hands was not very commonly used historically. It wasn't important to most people. During the English Civil War many recruits didn't know which hand or foot was left or right. During marching training instructors used to stick some hay in one boot and straw in the other for each recruit and call out "Hay, Straw, Hay, Straw".
Then you have cars, where left/right would make perfect sense in all cars from the driver’s perspective but instead people use “nearside” and “offside” which are relative to the kerb while driving[1]. That means it’s relative to which side of the road the country drives on so if you drive a right-hand-drive UK car into mainland Europe, do nearside and offside swap on that car and you need to buy differently named replacement parts?
Always annoying that it could be clearer and more stable and shorter to use the driver’s perspective with “Driver left/right” to be specific and then would be the same sides on all cars moving or parked in any orientation in all countries.
[1] not valid if you turn around and park backwards!
There's also the convention of inside and outside lanes on multilane roads.
In each the UK, Ireland, and the United States, the inside lane is the leftmost lane. However, due to driving on the opposite sides of the road, this means that while the inside lane in the US is closest to the central median, in the UK & Ireland, the inside lane is closet to the curb.
I would venture a guess the logic in some of these cases has a healthy does of practical wisdom baked in. On sailing vessels they are/were? chaotic, violent, noisy, and the crew perhaps wasn't the most experienced/educated(?) so keeping things simple with fixed names was perhaps the optimal safety solution in that environment. In the medical profession it's about the Hippocratic Oath (I am not a doctor), an operating room is more controlled, and everyone (is usually) well trained, so maybe in that environment it makes more sense to make a rule that the perspective should always be the patients? Thinking out loud here more than anything...
At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.
In an effort to avoid ambiguity, I always talk to my doctor in terms of "driver's side" and "passenger side" - thus adopting the maritime approach, but in more common terms.
I remember some time ago Cisco Nexus equipment that had different catalog definitions in the NX series (2000/5000/7000/9000) of the Air Intake definitions of where the "Front" was in a Front to Back fan setup. You literally had to order skus with conflicting descriptions if you wanted a consistent system.
Interestingly, on tennis courts you have the “deuce” side, which is to the right of the player, and the “ad” side, which is to the left of the player. Because you have two players facing each other, the deuce sides for each player are diagonally opposite from a neutral observer’s perspective.
> in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.
What if the patient lies on his back vs on his stomach? Theoretically this should then revert left and right in addition to how the doctors are facing the patient, from their point of view.
The patient's left and patient's right are always going to be the same, regardless of which way the patient is facing. It'll change it from the doctor's perspective, but that's irrelevant since you're only looking at it from the patient's.
I am aware of this. But oftentimes patients are completely covered by a green blanked with the exception of a small space of skin. I just thought that this could cause some confusion.
As a camera operator or director I always tended to use "your left/right", "my left/right" or "camera left/right". The first two made their way into my everyday speak as well.
> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.
Didn't know that! So how pervasive is this principal? Would it apply to a descriptive reference to a diagram in a book for example?
The reason is that when a patient comes to a doctor they will say they have a pain in their left side, without further qualification. So it makes sense to center the entire terminology around that situation. Otherwise doctors would constantly be having to do error-prone conversions.
I think the principle is pretty pervasive also outside medicals. I do not recall anyone ever refer to my left hand as right hand (other than maybe by mistake), regardless how they are oriented around me.
After all, doctors are humans and also have a body. It would be strange for them to write books saying that the heart is [#] on the right side when they have it on their left, etc.
When I was a kid in Minnesota we needed to learn port/starboard and the colors red/green.
A trick that helped me remember is that "LEFT", "PORT", and "RED" are all the shorter words and "RIGHT", "STARBOARD", and "GREEN" are the longer words in the respective pairs.
She has some kind of right/left dyslexia. When she's driving and I'm giving directions I have to tell her "short turn" or "long turn". Long turn being left, longer because it's across a lane, right turns are shorter.
But if someone told her that left is shorter than right for remembering purposes, it would probably mess her up more when following driving directions.
Holy crap my wife is the same, I have to tell her "turn my way" or "turn your way".
It drives me insane as I always subconsciously interpret it as a form of lazyness, your framing of it as a form od dyslexia may finally allow me to be less bothered by it!
I was once driving along fine in the left lane and my female friend in the passenger seat suddenly yelled "TURN RIGHT HERE. RIGHT HERE! RIGHT HERE!!!"
So I cut across two lanes, avoided several oncoming motorists and made a hasty but decent emergency right turn into the parking lot.
She looked disgusted and said "Why did you do that? The place is RIGHT over there" and pointed to an area on the other side of the street on the left of where I'd been. "Why didn't you turn left RIGHT THERE WHEN I TOLD YOU TO!".
Ah, I loved that girl (platonicly). She hit me with a shoe one time, but I still feel bad for who she married.
Whenever I hear the words 'left' and 'right' and have to act on them, i slightly twitch the corresponding arm or foot, and then can orient myself accordingly.
I "know" where my right arm is and I can feel it instinctively (as a right handed person, it's my main, default arm). But apparently my brain cannot map those words to directions in the outside world until it establishes a positional relation to my own body. I used to be ridiculed as a child for not knowing left from right until I developed the twitching trick.
I've done this for such a long time, one of the first times was at the eye doctor, when they test your vision with the symbols on the walls. Some of those "E" symbols were pointed in all directions and the hand twitch was so helpful. Thank you for sharing that tidbit!
My driving instructor had short pieces of colored tape on the beams between the windshield and side windows.
He would say to people with such problem "turn in the next left blue" every time.
So when they got to their test and and the tester will say to them "turn in the next right" their brain will add a "red" and they will look it up in the car and find it on the right beam.
I'm interested in the about the phrasing "in the next left/right."
Are you located in the US?
I moved from the mid-west to NYC and learned a fun regional language difference about waiting with others: Those from the NYC area say that they are "standing on line" whereas I had grown up saying "standing in line."
Completely unrelated… my mom had a small dog when she was younger. The dog sustained a head injury at some point, and after that could only make right turns. If the dog wanted to go left, it had to turn 270 degrees to the right. In all other ways the dog was completely normal. But now I’m wondering if the dog wanted to lie on its left side, would it lie on its right side, roll into its back, and then settle on its left side?
I also have a hesitation when it comes to left/right. As a kid I could only ever remember it as "left is the arm I wear my watch" so even as an adult I always had to take a second to think "watch arm or not" even a decade into the cell phone era when I stopped wearing a watch.
Now I live in Japan and when I speak Japanese I don't have the same problem at all. The brain (or at least my brain,) is a weird.
P.J. O'Rourke made the quip that "port wine is red, and so is your face if you get port and starboard mixed up." Which doesn't help, but it's funny.
For sailors, we learn "red-right-returning," which means to keep the red aids to navigation on the right (starboard) side when returning to port. Which is great, except when it doesn't apply--parts of Europe, Australia, a lot of Asia.
You'd think this would be a solved problem by now, but nope.
I understand that the terms are mostly unambiguous, but I always wonder how these get defined in edge cases. For example ferries, at least where I live, alternate the direction of travel as they go back and forth. There isn't a fixed "bow" or "stern" from which to define port and starboard.
This is a great question imo but I struggled to find anything very good. I found a forum post, https://www.sailnet.com/threads/double-ended-ferries-which-e... and between the trolling it seems that fore/aft and port/starboard switch when the direction reverses, including eg navigation lights (red for port, green for starboard). And they tend to also have a one end and a two end or an A/B end, and those labels don’t change.
I suspect they just don't use this terminology, unless it's to communicate with other vessels, and then it's presumably based on movement direction like you say.
The Washington State ferry system uses double-ended vessels with a pilot house on each end with the crew swapping between them at each crossing. Whichever end the crew are at becomes the bow.[1]
Funny -- I've ridden the ferries a lot and never really thought about it.
Kirkland, WA resident here. There is signage on the boat that uniquely identifies the #1 end and the #2 end of the boat. Can be helpful in finding your way back to your vehicle if you drove onto the ferry instead of being a walk-on passenger.
The thing to remember is that those directions are used for an awful number of things that have nothing to do with the ship moving. Like when you name places for storing things or various pieces of equipment. Changing those names would create a lot of mayhem.
When I captain a boat it is more important for me to communicate things unequivocally. I need to be able to specify what I want to happen, precisely. The crew does not really need to concern themselves with the direction the boat is moving or what is the bigger plan. They just get orders to do specific tasks. Only I (or whoever is responsible for the boat at the moment) really need to understand the context of those tasks although ideally the crew would also understand why they are doing things so that they can anticipate further orders or signal when I make a mistake.
Why this is important is because the plan may sometimes change and then my job is to put a new set of orders and I can't really start by explaining what the new changed plan is or getting any consent.
I was never in a situation like that, but if I was captaining a boat that can change directions, I would still keep stable naming that does not change when the boat stops or changes directions.
Though, as it turns out, double-ended craft are defined by the direction they are operating.
I'm curious on other items that are defined in this way. Is does make sense that broad rules are lifted for obvious reasons. Is why I can name a few things where screw threading is reversed from what we typically use.
Those ferries should be switching the direction the crew faces (perhaps in a different structure on the other end of the boat) and turning on the appropriate lights so port and starboard are lit correctly. They should have two sets of colored lights to handle travel in both directions.
Don't they have to swap the lights anyway if the ferry reverses direction? After all, the red/green indicators are primarily for showing which direction the ship is moving in.
With double ended ferries you're going to dock bow first because that's the direction all the cars pointed.
If you got halfway through a crossing and they announced there's a problem at the destination (broken thruster, docks on fire, dragons, docks on fire because of dragons), you would have to turn the ship around 180º and go back to your origin with the same bow that you started the trip with so everyone could disembark. The only time you'd switch ship orientation mid-trip is if something broke such that one end of the ship was navigable and the other was not. At which point you'd either have to dock backward (maybe with a tug) or everyone would have to back off the ship.
P and S are really defined by the direction of travel or what you decide they are. They are just conventions.
The Torpoint ferry in Plymouth (Devon, UK) is on chains, so front and back, bow and stern etc is moot. I think we can simply redefine that sort of ferry as a fish and avoid any snags. That strategy seems to work for astronomy when trying to wrangle planet/dwarf planet/lump of stuff n that.
Bee fish! What a delightful idea. We do seem to insist on the weird when we elect officials in democracy lands. On the bright side we do actually get to elect these odd balls rather than have them dropped into place from above.
Back in the day, in England at least, otters were classified as fish too for the purpose of allowable nosh on a Friday for your discerning Catholic. Nowadays we munch on depleted cod stocks and chips. Yum!
How on earth that became a thing in a country where it is impossible to get around 70 miles away from the sea beggars belief. There are also rather a lot of rivers hereabouts but we don't generally munch on freshwater fish here either - WTF?
Ha! I thought of this in one of the down thread discussions. Very curious on any official answer here, and I'll have to pay attention to the lights on the ferry, next time I'm on it.
I’m fairly confident that the “bow” in that case is always the direction of travel in this case and that starboard/port side change.
The lighting scheme on ships indicates the starboard side with a green light and the port side with a red light. This allows ships to figure out which way another ship is heading - especially at night. If you can see the red light on the left and green on the right while facing the other ship it’s going away from you, if it’s reversed then it’s coming towards you. If you can only see green it’s going to your right, to your left if you can see red.
Retaining that property is important for navigation, so starboard and port have to swap sides.
Pretty much every boat with onboard motors are capable of reversing thrust. Do they all switch like that when traveling in reverse? (Serious question, not a boat person, never been on a boat that wasn't a ferry )
I don’t think boats travel in reverse very often because it’s inefficient to do so. If the boat is going in reverse, it’s probably docking, maneuvering, or having problems. In any of those cases, the crew should be situationally aware enough, and the boat slow enough, that they don’t need color-coded lights to keep themselves from causing a collision.
“Normal” boats only go in reverse when they are maneuvering, never for extended distances and at travel speeds. Unless they’re purpose built they never travel in reverse - rudders are less efficient if going reverse, propellers are as well, and hulls are shaped to reduce drag when going forward.
You’ll basically only see boats going in reverse in harbors or exceptional circumstances. In harbors, speeds are generally low and extra caution is required of all ships. For exceptional circumstances, you’ll have special ways of communicating this - specific lighting patterns, flags, horns to warn others.
They can’t do it that way because the question of right of way only matters when two boats are going towards each other. The coloration is an easy visual indicator of where a boat is generally going that doesn’t require seeing any other part of the boat to work, and will even work in fog. You cannot safely flip the directions for any fraction of the boat’s travel.
The differentiation between rudder and engine is crucial. The Conning Officer, who gives orders to the helm at the direction of the Officer of the Deck, will call rudder orders as "left standard rudder" or "right full rudder".
Engine orders will be given in terms of "all engines ahead 1/3", "back 1/3" or "port engine ahead 1/3, starboard engine back 1/3" (to put a clockwise twist on when maneuvering). Frequently when on a great circle voyage, one may have the port shaft making turns for, e.g. 13kts, and the starboard shaft just trailing in the water, for fuel efficiency.
The crucial point here is that these order terms are like strong data types in code. We do not mix them. In a stressful situation, e.g. the Straits of Malacca, the last thing anyone needs is entropy from a terminology mix-up. Lives are literally at stake.
Bonus point: the port/starboard nomenclature is also applies to spatial locations off of the centerline. Compartments go, level, frame (bow to stern numbering), centerline position. e.g.
6 4 2 0 1 3 5
Thus, as a young lad at the end of the Cold War, working on Aegis in CG-57, my computer room was O1-138-0-C.
The centerline numbering is in accordance with PESO: Port: Even, Starboard: Odd.
To this day, I set up my cel phone headset IAW PESO, based upon the day of the month. Go, Navy.
Best comment in this thread, a lot of folks seem to be stuck on the etymology rather than the very deliberate use of special keywords in collabrative working.
Sailing, Flight, Surgery; All of these require people to work together, in scenarios where a misinterpreted instruction can cost lives.
The Tenerife Airport Disaster, still the deadliest aviation accident was caused by bad communication procedures. [1]
Because you need to differentiate between "my left when facing the boat" and "my left when on the boat facing forward" or really, left from any other perspective.
And any time there's a multi-word phrase like that that gets used a lot over many years, it gets shortened.
“Vessels with bilateral symmetry have left and right halves which are mirror images of each other. One asymmetric feature is where access to a boat, ship, or aircraft is at the side, it is usually only on the port side (hence the name)”
Port makes sense, never thought about it. Ships I see rarely, so I couldn't tell which side they use (or even both depending on the harbor) But for passenger planes it's definitely left.
In German starboard is steuerbord, steuern = to steer. No shifting over the centuries.
However, port is still backbord. I am not familiar with Northern dialects (where they have a coast), back does not tell me anything. Maybe packen = to pack/load)??? Interestingly enough the English argument that the 2 words should not be too similar has not been applied. Maybe because there are already 3 vs. 2 syllables? Whereas English had 2 and 2 so they changed to 2 vs. 1 to make it make obvious what was said even in a big storm?
Similarly, the Danish terms are »styrbord« and »bagbord«, respectively. »Bagbord« comes from »bag« (back) meaning the backside of the sailor steering the boat, because they would be facing the steering side (»styrbord«; »styr« still means to steer today).
I remember thinking why didn’t they just use “boat left” or something, but then at the sailing coarse I took, I remember there was a boat heading toward us and I was skippering, had to communicate exactly how I wanted to pass the other ship - and saying “to port” was just soo simple and easy - a “to our boats left” would have been way too long and you had to communicate things quite quickly… That’s when it “clicked” how useful this shorthand really was.
The only was I can remember which is port and starboard is by thinking about boarding an airplane. The steps/tunnel are always docked on the 'port' side, just as boats always dock on the port side. The cockpit/bow is always on your left when you board.
And further, "port" wine is red, and the red beacon light is on the port side of an aeroplane (with the starboard side having green, and white on the tail)
But if you are working with horses or other draft animals, you work them from the "near" (left) side, and not the "off" (right) side. Next up in directions trivia: shotgun, deasil, and widdershins.
This is the same method I use. I always wondered why they didn't use the cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) or why they didn't use the hours of a clock face to indicate direction. With the clock face, you get even more precision where exactly something happened. Man overboard, 4 o'clock!
And "fore" and "aft" are useful to disambiguate the ends of boats that flip 90 degrees in pitch, because the front becomes the top and the back becomes the bottom.
You still use left and right on board, but referring to other things. E.g. you sit on the left side of the table, and by using "left" it's clear that your reference is the table itself and not the ship.
What you achieve is a new set of coordinates relative to the vessel. You are going north, sitting on the port, with a glass of wine in your right hand, instead of going up and sitting on the left.
This all feels a bit like arguing against the use of cardinal directions because they don't make sense unless you learn them first.
If you use left and right for the ship, you wouldn't be able to use personal left and right without risking ambiguity. You'd just be trading one convenience for the other.
Port and starboard become instinctive very quickly, with no mental gymnastics needed. Left and right are confusing, there must be a reason all sailors are using those terms..
Tradition is a form of collective intelligence. Tradition is the ritual the Yandruwandha carry out to cook nardoo. Without that ritual it is poisonous.
No, it's just a form of long-term repetition, intelligence is not required, just don't limit your example set to those that save you from poison, but also include those that poison
They say that it's because "left" and "right" depend on your orientation (it would perhaps be confusing to talk about "the left side of the boat" if you're facing the stern (rear) and the side in question is on your right).
It's probably a similar reason people talk about the "driver's side" and "passenger's side" of a car instead of the left and right sides.
Left and Right didn't have their modern meaning back then. In Old English riht meant straight, as in direct or not bent. It later assumed the meaning of correct as in right and wrong. Lyft meant weak. Their reference to handedness seems to have been incidental. It seems odd to us to talk about the 'straight' and 'weak' hand, but to them it made sense, but maybe not to talk about the 'straight' or 'weak' sides of a boat.
The concept of left and right hands was not commonly used historically. During the English Civil War many recruits didn't know which hand or foot was left or right. During marching training instructors used to stick some hay in one boot and straw in the other for each recruit and call out "Hay, Straw, Hay, Straw".
It's a bit like theater - left and right are different depending on whether you're looking at the stage (such as from the audience) or looking out from the stage. So you have to have "stage left" and "house left" (and the same for right) to distinguish them. But it's still confusing if somebody just says left. Which left?
So they could just say something like "ship left" and "ship right" that are always referenced to the bow of the ship, and that would work almost as well, but having special terms just removes any possibility for confusion.
I like this description, but I have always thought that the saying "There is some red port left in the bottle" a much simpler way of remembering the conjunction of these terms. Assuming you are fasting forwards in the boat of course!
There's kind of a fun brain teaser related to this. Imagine you're speaking to an entirely alien species in another dimension. And you're trying to describe "left" to them. It's impossible.
I say it's a brain teaser only because this sounds highly improbable at first. Forwards and backwards can be described, and even up/down if we assume basic fundamental rules remain the same. Yet left and right? It seems impossible for it to be impossible.
It turns out you can define it from looking at radioactive decay (or any other interaction governed by the weak force). Feynman famously had a short description that ended with the punch line
> Suppose, after lots of communication you finally can go into space and meet your alien counterpart. If, as you approach one another, the alien extends its left hand to shake, watch out! He’s made of antimatter!
because even the physics of weak decays of will invert in an antimatter universe.
I think it should also be possible with electro magnetism. By first defining the sign convention for electron flow and then deriving left hand and right hand rules of magnetism or something like that. It’s a bit tricky to explain the sign convention, but I think if one sticks with the movement of elementary particles, it should work.
Which claim? The full transcript of the Feynman story is available online [1], you can search for "martian" to get right to the story. It's presented in the context of explaining CP symmetry, which says that physics is conserved under a parity (mirror reflection) plus charge inversion (matter -> antimatter) transformation. Of course it's only approximate [2].
I got the quote slightly differently from what is recorded on the caltech sight, the one they have is
> So if our Martian is made of antimatter and we give him instructions to make this “right” handed model like us, it will, of course, come out the other way around. What would happen when, after much conversation back and forth, we each have taught the other to make space ships and we meet halfway in empty space? We have instructed each other on our traditions, and so forth, and the two of us come rushing out to shake hands. Well, if he puts out his left hand, watch out!
So the claim is that CP violation would make it possible to define "left" without ever pointing at things? Of course then the question would be what this definition actually is.
The assertion that it is possible or the attribution to Feynman? Scientific American [1] references Feynman's 4th Messenger lecture at Cornell: "Symmetry in Physical Law" (1964) [2] [3]
It isn't impossible, it is just arbitrary. The whole reason we can have this huge thread about different names for directions is that they is just arbitrary labels, with groups of people having a consensus on what word to use.
BTW, If you really must explain it without just saying it is arbitrary, you can talk about clockwise vs. counterclockwise... which came from sundials, which came from the direction our shadows move as the sun moves. In a similar vein, Left goes against the shadows, Right follows the shadows.
Shadows come from the rotation of the earth, not its orbit. But you are still correct - if the earth suddenly started having inconsistency in the direction it spins, that explanation would fall apart.
I think this is due to the bilateral symmetry of most animals. But imagine being non-symmetric yourself (or the alien race being non-symmetric). The concepts of left and right seem to become much more communicable now.
Yeah the handedness of a 3D coordinate system is a pretty arbitrary low level choice. You don’t even need to talk to aliens, just try implementing some geometric algorithm in Unity which uses a left-handed system.
One approach would be: you're moving along a straight line, perpendicular to a large body that attracts you through gravity.
Now "down" is towards the gravity, "up" is the opposite direction, and "left" and "right" are perpendicular, but which one is left and right, if you cannot rely on handedness?
That helps if you meet them in person, but if you communicate through radio waves, they'll have no way to know how to decode signal into an image with the intended left/right and up/down orientation
Too bad there are no good substitutes for general use that don't make you sound like a wannabe pirate.
On one of our products (that has symmetric speakers, sensors and lights) we use "proper left" and "proper right" in reference material. The markings are also molded on the chassis. It makes communicating with technicians in the field so much easier.
This explanation feels kind of awkward. My left hand does not depend on my orientation, so I am unclear why the "left side" of a boat would.
I get why there are better terms to use when talking about others. At least, I think I do. But it feels like there is more history to these terms than just "needs to be fixed."
Because left and right are ambiguous - are you talking about MY left or the boat’s left? Having unambiguous names let’s us differentiate and avoid confusion.
It might be hard to grok the need for this if you’ve never been in a tight spot while sailing or operating a watercraft with a crew - but having this distinction has probably saved thousands of bad incidents from happening.
There's a similar issue in medical imaging, when oriented with the patient "facing you". Then my left is patient right and vice versa.
This is why in the days of processed x-ray films, TV shows would more commonly hang a chest x-ray incorrectly[1], with the (patient's) "left" label on the left instead of the right. It's less common now that the example imaging is digital.
I can see it as advantageous. With the major caveat that it is only advantageous to folks that have been taught it. Not shockingly, a large portion of the passengers on a boat are going to be confused if told to go to the starboard windows to see the whales that are beside the boat. How will you explain it? I'm going to guess that you will probably say "right." :D. (Note that this isn't hypothetical. I take a ferry fairly often, and surprisingly few of us know starboard from port.)
Yes, in that situation, you can confidently tell them to look to their right, because you can assume that most of them will sit in direction of travel and face forward. However, the same is not true for a sailor who might be running around on deck.
This isn't accurate, either. Most of us are decidedly not facing the direction of travel. Specifically, we are evenly split in large parts of the boat, as they have bench chairs that face each other. Or you are on the side of the boat facing out.
The ferry is actually a very odd boat in this, btw. As I am not clear that starboard/port are fixed. The boat literally goes in both directions, such that I'm assuming I don't have to know which is the "front" of it irrespective of the direction it is currently traveling.
I get your point, that things can be difficult. And I appreciate having jargon that is specific for an attempt to make things clearer. I just find this as the sole explanation kind of unsatisfactory. Seeing the history of the terms makes a lot more sense.
> The ferry is actually a very odd boat in this, btw. As I am not clear that starboard/port are fixed. The boat literally goes in both directions, such that I'm assuming I don't have to know which is the "front" of it irrespective of the direction it is currently traveling.
From what I understand, on ferries (and similar "two-sided" working boats), port and starboard get switched around when the boat changes direction of travel, usually when docked (and its navigation lights also turn from green to red and vice-versa).
Port and starboard are indeed fixed (same with bow and stern), so that no matter which way the boat is moving or the passengers are facing, those words always refer to the same physical sides of the boat :)
Per another thread, this may not be the case for ferries? At least not for ones that don't turn around. (Note that many "people ferry" boats are able to turn around. Larger car ferries are fully symmetric and have no fixed bow/stern.
Edit: I found more discussion on this by searching for "double ended" boats. Port/starboard do indeed change depending on the direction of travel from all results I've found.
Sure. If nothing else, they've got labels on 'end 1' and 'end 2', and the rest of the boat is labeled into quadrants that don't change (A-D). If there's a galley, that's on one end or the other; the passenger deck is assymmetric.
The car decks and the sundeck appear to be mostly symmetric other than labelling, and maybe elevator placement? The machinery under the car decks is likely somewhat assymetric too, but I've never gotten to go down below.
Not the ones I ride. They have engines on each end.
To be fair, they may not be 100% symmetrical. I am not measuring. They are close enough that I can't imagine it would be a good use of the terms. (That is, when the VAST majority of the time the bow is the front of the boat, having a few bigger boats where I have to inspect it to know which is bow and stern would be a bad idea.)
This feels contrived, to be honest. Late at night on a vehicle that isn't moving with no other discerning factors to distinguish things, and you are basically screwed. Though, realistically, you are just going to wherever the shouting is coming from, you are not going to go slow to orient yourself to the vehicle. Even better, someone would yell something even more defining for where to catch someone that is going to be specific to the boat you are on. (Well, more realistically, you have hopefully practiced emergency drills such that the term is almost irrelevant, you have practiced so much.)
This is about as worrisome as "you are the fire department, and you are told you need to rescue some people on the 14th floor. Quick, does that mean you go up 13 flights of stairs, or 11?" Realistically, you aren't getting it right on spur of the moment decision making.
Great points. And I'd add that thanks to wind and water, ships can also move in directions besides the obvious one. So it's possible in this case the boat could be moving west, giving another direction that left could be relative to.
There are other uses for the definite article. E.g., "Down the hall and on the left." It's also used in relation to motion. "Go to the left of that ship." Even if you went with it, though, it still has the potential to be confusing.
Speaking as somebody who sails occasionally, to me "left" and "port" are just very different concepts. It's sort of like driver's side and passenger's side of the car, but more intense. So I think the desire to use "left" mainly comes from people who don't spend much time on ships, an audience, not particularly important to sailors. Sort of like how non-programmers might struggle with some of our technical terms, but we'd never change.
"Left" vs "the left" is not good enough. That could still mean either concept semantically, and you can't be sure the person speaking to you didn't mess up the convention when the two are that close.
A crew (any kind of crew) requires exceedingly clear communication. "Ship left" and "ship right" could work, but what if the environment is noisy and you're not sure if the first word was "ship" or something else? Domain-specific, unique terms are fantastic tools for crews.
Whether "the left" means your left, the ship's left or yet another left (the harbour's?) is highly ambiguous. You can't assume that everyone will instantly understand this correctly.
I think starboard and port make more sense here because they only describe parts of the ship, so the meaning of the terms is completely unambiguous.
Any room for error is a guarantee that a human will mess it up. Left already has a definition, so there's room for confusion; a word specifically talking about the ship is more concise.
True but you are not wandering around yourself! I agree though that the first para looks like just so nonsense. I know plenty of matelots (UK Navy) that use left and right, sharp end and blunt end for the cardinal points of a vessel. I do as well and use port, starb'd, bow and stern as they do too.
Ironically enough, port and starboard markers which are the red and green buoys you see near to ports (yes!) need to be considered in reverse when going out. The green ones are called starboard markers and if you are in a big enough vessel, you should keep them off your starboard (right) side when approaching a port from the open seas. On the way out from port to the open seas you should keep the red ones on your right instead. If you don't you will hit the seabed and sink.
Once you have got the hang of p/s buoys, you just need to get to grips with cardinal markers and a few other things and the way you drive on the sea will start to make sense. Even Brits drive on the right on the seas!
There is a general rule that "power gives way to sail". That's fine for vessels of similar size.
However I have seen 30' yachts on the Baltic try to persuade 100,000+ tonne tankers of this and not really getting the fact that inertia means that the big lump can't really turn in any meaningful way - they sort of orbit!
Overtaking vessel keeps clear. On odd numbered years when Mars is in Saturn on a Friday you should dance with a Nun for three minutes at midnight every 70 days, unless it's Lent or you are a Nun in which case you should dance with an otter. There are a few more rules but that is largely it. Maritime isn't too complicated but do remember that the road has a habit of jumping 30' or more upwards or down simply for a laugh.
> Ironically enough, port and starboard markers which are the red and green buoys you see near to ports (yes!) need to be considered in reverse when going out. The green ones are called starboard markers and if you are in a big enough vessel, you should keep them off your starboard (right) side when approaching a port from the open seas. On the way out from port to the open seas you should keep the red ones on your right instead. If you don't you will hit the seabed and sink.
Just to keep things fun, that's the european convention. In the US it's "red right returning", the exact opposite.
"But whether they are green to port and red to starboard or the opposite depends entirely upon what region of the world you are navigating. The IALA established two regions: Region A and Region B.
Region A consists of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Africa and most of Asia. When entering a harbor in this region, marks to port are red and marks to starboard are green.
Region B consists of North America, Central America and South America, plus the Philippines, Japan and Korea. When entering a harbor in this region, marks to port are green and marks to starboard are red (red, right, return!)."
Because if you face the back of the boat the sides reverse. It’s similar to stage left. When you can’t afford to be confused, one name is better than a conflicting argument between your left and the boats left.
Do you own a car? Commonly when speaking with a mechanic they'll ask questions like Driver's side or Passenger's side to get away from left/right.
People very often describe things with just _left_ or just _right_. They don't say things like when I'm sitting in the car the door to my left is hard to open. They just say the left door is broken even when both them and the mechanic are facing the car head on.
By having people use an unambiguous vocabulary it makes up for people not thinking about how their statements will be interpreted. If the deckhands were genius's they're be charting the course not heaving rope.
You aren't wrong. In that mistakes can be made. But if I ask you about your left hand, is that ambiguous? By your definition here, that is an ambiguous question. But, that just feels wrong.
Edit: I'll note that it is amusing to compare to cars. It seems the etymology of the terms is literally "driver side".
It's not ambiguous because you have a directional reference built into the phrase and speaking directly to a singular person: "ask you about your left hand".
It is certainly clear if one would say "left facing stern" or "left facing aft", but that's a mouthful when you can just shorten it (and the reference facing direction is not relevant). Bonus points if the shortened version can't be mistaken for another direction...
BTW, I'm 100% down for introducing dedicated words for "my left", "your left" etc vs just "on the left". It would certainly save me a bit of time when my family asks me to look for something and they flip between the two meanings in the same sentence.
This still falls due to you having to have a point of reference for front of boat. See other threads where double ended ones do not have fixed starboard and port.
Reminds me of this book[0] about (air-cooled) VW maintenance, which goes right into how to tear down and rebuild the engine. Anyway, it can be disorienting, at the back of the car, looking at the engine and knowing what’s front/back, but I recall he wrote something like:
Now look at the front of the engine (FRONT IS FRONT) and you’ll see…
Also, happens to generally be one of the most beautiful to read and to look-at technical manuals I can think of. Right up there w The C Programming Language.
The problem is that people (especially in stressful situations when they’re not thinking carefully) will say things like “that one on the left!” and the person they’re talking to (who is often facing them and thus reversed) won’t think to ask “my left or yours?”
But if you train people to use specifically-invented unambiguous terms that can’t be screwed up, their brains will reach for those words when they’re in trouble.
What if you're addressing someone on a boat who's facing sideways? Or a group of people facing different directions? Or you can't see them and don't know which direction they're facing, and they don't know which direction you're facing?
This is not the same explanation that I was familiar with. The one I heard was that long ago boats didn't have the rudder on the centerline, but was to one side. Because of this configuration you also had to have the dock on the other side. The rudder was called the a steer-board (eventually pronounced starboard). And the dock was the port so that became the port side. So now we have starboard and port sides of the ship from this old boat type.
Reminds me a similar bit about some dimension of the space shuttle being limited by the width of a horse's ass [0].
An additional starboard/port issue is right of way for sailboats. Suppose that you're going upwind and two close hauled boats are crossing. Who has right of way?
When boats are on opposite tacks, a port-tack boat shall keep clear of a starboard-tack boat. Rule 10.
A boat is on the tack, starboard or port, corresponding to her windward side. RRS Definitions.
Also a convenient way to remember right of way while on the water is to use the port/starboard lights of the approaching boat. If you see green (their starboard side) that means you have the right of way, and red means they have the right of way. Just like traffic lights :)
The rule of thumb I go for with boats is that the vessel with worse steering has right of way. For instance a freighter has right of way over a sailing boat regardless of direction or wind because the freighter isn't going to be able to change course in any appreciable amount of time.
Plastic boats give way to wooden ship, wooden ships give way to metal ships, and nothing gives way anything much smaller than itself - Not the colreg rules, but a good approximation for unskilled crew members. Especially on a wooden ship.
In Greek boating terms, we use just plain left and right. At sailing school we were taught that left means always the left side of the ship as it travels forward, and similarly the right.
We do use different words for the direction of the ship facing towards or away from the wind though.
Not sure if the ancients used other words though. We managed to avoid confusion for a few hundred years though.
Ships began using centre-mounted, bladed rudders so that they could be more easily docked at the Hanseatic League port of Ipswich in England.
It seems obvious to put a rudder at the centre of a boat now but prior to this development rudders were mounted on the starboard (steering) side. That's where a steering oar would naturally enter the water when the man holding is standing on the centre line of the boat. They just copied that position when they first added bladed rudders.
Specifically they moved the rudder to the centre so that they could more easily turn around in the Orwell[1] estuary. Something to do with Ipswich's port being on the opposite side of the river to most other ports in the region.
The earliest known depiction of a centre-mounted, bladed rudder is on an 11th century seal of the town now in the Royal Greenwich Museum[2].
To this day the town's crest features three centre mounted rudders and a lion[3].
It's a fun story but do take it with pinch of salt as I can't verify it. :)
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0. On a history tour by an old chap with an impenetrable Suffolk accent. Not sure if that counts as a good source of truth but it was certainly entertaining.
1. Another fun bit of trivia, that's the river that George Orwell named himself after.
It's funny to me that some olaf 1000 years ago just called them what they were; the steering side and the docking side, and now we have to use the same words which don't make any sense to us. I vote we just call them the steering-side and the docking-side again.
My understanding is that port’s usage is somewhat recent. In the English sailing world the opposite of starboard was larboard. The royal navy made the change within the last few hundred years.
The steering side is now the back. And docking .. in the Mediterranean the docking side is commonly the back too. In Scandinavia it's commonly the front.
It's probably for the best that they've been detached from their original meanings.
Because the words come from Dutch nautical terms. “Starboard” is really “Steer-board”, an external keel on one side of a boat. Therefore Port is the only side of the boat that can dock to the port.
The etymology hails from old Norse and the Viking age, before making it into English. Styrbord, the side you steer (styr) on, and Babord/bakbord, the side your back (bak/bakåt) faces.
One domain where this concept of handling ambiguous left and right in natural language is generative image AI models like StableDiffusion.
What I wouldn't give for a clear syntax to define what I mean when I say "left side" or "to the right" in a way that captures a character or object which may be rotated in any number of positions.
Running 100 generations with the same prompt and different seeds demonstrates how hard this is to solve using words.
It gets even more confusing when the commanding officer orders hard a starboard. Does that mean turn the wheel left or right? Apparently it depends on the ship. There is the unsubstantiated story the Titanic crew bungled this. https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-51664720100922
A large part of learning to sail a boat is learning the terminology.
Everything has a name and none of the names coincide with non-nautical experience.
For instance, a “rope” on a sailboat refers to the metal part of a line usually used to the main sail. What non-sailors would call a rope, sailors call a line.
There’s a working vocabulary of 50-100 such terms and then hundreds more when you start talking about very specific pieces of equipment.
These seem no less confusing honestly (do they still load from the "port" side? What about yachts?). They reference a particular side of the boat but as referenced to a specific spot on the boat (where the steering is or was in the past). If you are not standing there, you still need to do some mapping in your head.
I always knew port was left and starboard was right, but I basically used the trick "left is four letters, like port". I like learning etymology, though, because now I don't need some trick, I just understand the reason that the word is used.
For those who think left/right is enough: When you are racing sailboats, a boat on your “left” (or “right”) can have “right” of way because the wind is hitting their main sail from the “right” and yours from the “left”.
They will yell “starboard!” at you, rather than “left” or “right”. Easier that way.
My brother in law works in building airplanes. Since a lot of the big pieces are mirrors of each other, the factories themselves are divided into two “sides”. In Spain they are called Left and Right, but in the UK they use the maritime terms instead.
Back when i had sailing lessons, the skipper told us this story about the sailors coming home to harbour after weeks of sailing the oceans.
They returned to their loved ones who they kept in their HEART which is RED and LEFT and since they were sailing towards the port, the RED lights are to be kept left from the ship.
Laughing at myself for ignorance but I thought "port" was east because sailing south from Europe meant that the ports were on the left, and the stars were on the right and most cargo ships didn't make it back. Sigh
When it gets really confusing is when you are on a sailboat and get the command to pull 'altabasa' (you may know it's a type of rope, but no idea which one or even where is the pulling location).
Does it really explain why or even give a reason that makes sense. The steering was right so right side was called starboard? How does that make sense? So just call right right and left left.
Governments should use outer 3d body scans instead of photos to reduce the mayhem that mirrors, cameras and screens cause in the unconscious of humans. Also ban vehicles with mirrored letters.
I read that the British word posh comes from Port Out - Starboard Home, which is the type of UK to US return ticket you’d get, if you could afford it, to have a cabin facing the sun both ways.
I love articles like this. Snappy, to the point, without unnecessary fluff. And I actually learned something. I enjoy understanding the history of language and culture.
To this day, at airports around the world aircraft are almost exclusively loaded (the passengers, at least) on the port side. Funny how these traditions continue!
Having the opposite handedness of most other people (i.e. being left-handed) is an advantage in a fight. That's because righties are used to fight against other righties because most people are righties, lefties are also used to fight against other righties. It means that when a lefty fights a righty, the lefty is in a familiar situation while the righty is not, giving the lefty an advantage. And indeed, in many sports where you have an opponent, at high level, there is a higher than normal proportion of lefties.
On the other hand (pun not intended), having the same handedness as most other people (i.e. being right-handed) is an avantage for cooperation. For example, to righties can easily share a tool made for righties, but it will be awkward for a lefty.
So there are two opposing forces here: cooperation tends to make people of all the same handedness, while competition pushes for a 50/50 distribution. We are at about 90/10, suggesting that the cooperation aspect is more important but not absolutely so.
That dominant side is the right side is probably just due to random chance. That it doesn't differ between population groups suggest that it happened before humans spread around the globe, possibly before humans were human.
Probably the same reason why most biomolecules are chiral, i.e. having left and right side.
Last time I read about this, I think some physicist said something about the rotation of elementary particles and radiation stuff that are way over my head.
Haha no, I think you misunderstood. I meant the underlying reason for human to have a preferred "side" is probably the same reason that life has a preferred "side" for chemicals. Both humans and enzymes can be chiral, i.e. asymmetrical so I think they might be connected.
Don't worry, I am not an atom-ist or a chiral-ist. All sides are equal! (except the ambidextrous master race :D )
I suspect it's different, in that I expect the reason for people is something like "handedness makes people better at violence". Whereas I suspect chirality is more like driving on the right/left side of the road. Which one you pick doesn't matter, but picking is less chaotic than not picking.
I actually don't know. Like I mentioned above, there have been a few theories about how life is so strongly asymmetrical but nothing concrete or proven yet. In fact, it is a bit counterintuitive because all natural chemical reactions produces racemic mixtures and only life produces specific stereoisomers. It also means life has evolved to give up nearly half of the natural resources available, a very strange thing in terms of evolution.
Not all enzymes are stereospecific though. Some of them can take any configuration of a chemical and convert them to other type of isomer. But these are rare and usually an exception, not the norm. Still, it makes it harder to figure out why chirality is so important in life and not so much in some other parts of life.
Maybe your explanation about handedness makes sense. But then it would fail at explaining ambidextrous people since they are definitely better and yet still so rare. Life is really difficult to figure out.
Speaking as a nominal leftie who is effectively ambidextrous for everything but writing, I don't think we're better. I'm just not particularly good at sports. Body-things take more time to learn, and I have to practice with both sides if I want to be good at both sides.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but your notion that being ambidextrous is better is a huge assumption. Having a dominant side could have the same sort of benefit that specialization usually does: better for the cases that really matter, worse for the cases that are less important.
"Driver" and "passenger" side for cars. Oh wait, doesn't work in England etc.
I guess for ships there is no variation between countries? Starboard is presumably where the wheel was so everyone must have left it on the right side?
Things that are driver-side in the U.S. are also driver-side in England, because the layout is designed around the position of the driver.
"Starboard" comes from Old English "steor bord", which meant "steering side of the boat" back in the days when a steering oar was used to steer the boat. Most sailors were right-handed so this was almost always the right side. It was easier to dock with the other side of the boat facing the port, so the left side became "larboard" and then simply "port." English is the international nautical language owing to its centuries of dominance of the oceans, followed by the U.S. dominance of global politics, so the English terms became the standard nautical terms. (Note: technically the international nautical language is "Seaspeak," which is a special dialect of English created specifically for nautical use.)
Having grown up in a large transit-oriented city, I learned to drive as a grownup. I really struggled with the concept of reversing. "Turn the wheel left!" "You just turn the wheel the way you want the _back_ of the car to go." "No, the other left!"
At this point I was still limited to driving in empty 1000 space parking lots and was getting frustrated. One day I realized, I could ask my driving companion-turned-instructor "hey when you say left and right, can you just say passenger-side or driver-side?" After a few iterations at this, it all clicked. My new-driver brain could do absolute positioning consistently with minimal effort, instead of having to calculate relative positioning each time and getting frazzled.
“The steering oar or steering board is an over-sized oar or board, to control the direction of a ship or other watercraft prior to the invention of the rudder.“
In the UK the (possibly?) more common terms are nearside (kerb side) and offside (road side).
It's maybe better than "driver" and "passenger side" because it still makes sense when you're driving a car with different "handedness" to your current road network.
Right, that was my point. The article says that port/starboard is used because left/right is confusing depending on the direction. But unlike ships cars have the driver side right or left so it's not that useful.
"Left side" and "right side" is unambiguous, because there is one given direction (forward). It is the same as "left bank" and "right bank" of a river (it is always looking downstream).
For example, Slavic languages usually just use some sort of "left side" and "right side".
it's unambiguous if you know you're talking about direction relative to the boat, but you don't know that you're talking about direction relative to the boat.
your left hand is still your left hand, even if it's on the starboard side of the boat. you always need some additional disambiguation to specify that you're talking about the boat. i've never sailed a boat with slavic people, but i'm guessing they use a phrase like "boat left" and "boat right", not just "left" or "right".
also, i've never heard anybody describe a riverbank as "left" or "right". riverbanks would be described by their cardinal direction, like the "east bank" or the "south bank"
They should get rid of these terms, as they are distracting.
A big part of the training material for boating license is about learning things that people are not using in practice, which makes less time / mental power to learn what is really important to survive and avoid crash (what's really important).
They are not distracting. There are many intense situations on a boat, and a crew is required to cooperate in order to survive. This means you must have extremely precise wording to quickly explain what needs to be done. This vocabulary is important for this reason, and is able to sharpen focus, rather than distract.
It requires a process of learning, and that is intentional.
I’m not sure you have really thought this through.
You’re suggesting that people avoid using port and starboard on a boat because they should be focused on learning how to not fall overboard?
Terms like “port” and “starboard” are particularly important when someone falls overboard. The last thing you want to do is tell someone to grab the man overboard “on the right side” and have them go to the wrong side of the boat in a crucial moment. This is why these things exist. We have been sailing for hundreds of years and are very good at it.
Despite this, your entire argument is a bit ridiculous. It is not zero sum- port and starboard do not take up “brain space” that causes you to forget a life jacket. Boat training will help you ensure the safety of the passengers AND teach you “port” and “starboard”.
I'm not sure what boat training you're talking about. I just did my sea boating license last year in Croatia, and it was all in a room, just like the exam.
When I was doing my original boating license, again the practical part on water was about 20 minutes (starting / stopping and saving somebody from water)
I had much more road practice in my road driving license included, and there wasn't anything unnecessary taught there, I still use 90% of the things taught then when I am driving.
In English "right" is one syllable and "starboard" is two. All things considered, using right/left is more concise. If you are aware enough of your orientation on a boat to know where port and starboard are located, you are also aware enough to know where left and right are located.
The different number of syllables are like a checksum.
Plus, that's not how brains work. Using a word for different things that change depending on context is like reusing a variable, with a compiler that randomizes global and local scope. In aviation they watch out for "Regression to prior learning", in the kitchen I watch out for putting something in the microwave instead of the fridge because the action is similar.
If you ask me which way is left, I'll have to stop and think not only about what left and right even mean, probably looking at my hand to see what makes the L shape, but I'll have to wonder who's left you're referring to, in addition to performing a mental rotation, an extremely error prone operation that I basically avoid at all costs, if my heading is not the same as the ships.
Any small about of simplification or added reliability there is a good thing.
Especially in historical context. Assuming the port and starboard were not mostly symmetric and had features specific to docking and steering, you're actually referring to something specific, not an abstract direction.
These conventions are designed for the 95%, not the 5% or 75% or whatever who can instantly tell which way is left relative to any given orientation without any effort.
Clarity absolutely does not stem from brevity. Brevity is good, but it pushes toward ambiguity, not clarity.
For example, consider spelling a word. The briefest approach is to say the names of letters. But these are similar, often differing only in one phoneme. E.g., P and B differentiating sounds are both bilabial plosives, differing only in whether they are voiced. But people for whom clarity is important will use something like the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. There, you'd say "papa" and "bravo". [1] It is much less brief, but much more clear.
We might have a different view on what "brevity" means, then. The ITU/NATO alphabet you mentioned is a prime example of brevity. Other examples include those used by air traffic control and fighter pilots.
In practice, and perhaps because of this, the pronunciation of "starboard" is heavy on the "star", with the latter part ending up more like "brd" or "b'd". Indeed, you can find the word written as "starb'd".
I'd bet port and starboard are easier to communicate unambiguously than left and right. Absolute positioning, one syllable vs two, different ending sounds vs both ending a "tuh" sound.
At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective. You could imagine that the maritime world could have gone with a similar convention. But the downside is that on very rare occasions someone along the way gets confused and the doctor operates on the wrong side of the body.
The theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right", which always refer to the perspective of an actor onstage facing the audience. Then the word "stage" tells you the perspective, but you still keep the words left/right so you don't have to memorize two completely separate words.