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Comment by fargle | Hacker News Reader

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.

FWIW.

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This would probably throw my girlfriend off.

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.

You sound like Raymond Reddington.

This is basically the plot to the John Cleese film Clockwise: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090852/

or playfully, "no, the OTHER right" :)

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!

This sounds like a potentially dangerous condition to have if you drive, no? Is there a name for this?

My wife has the same issue. I say turn "your side" or turn "my side."

In our relationship it's me who has that. So she'll tell me "right" and "no, the other right". Or vice versa.

I was taught "Jack left port" and I know port (wine) is red.

Fun times ahead if you do international driving :)

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.

He claimed it usually solved the issue.

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."

That little in vs. on sounds so different!

Not at all (: That took place in Israel.

I've used mostly word by word translation from Hebrew as I didn't intuitively found "right" translation that will convey the same idea.

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.

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 learned “right red dead” in aviation - if you see the red light right of the green light, it means the other plane is headed for you!

I was taught the mnemonic “There’s no red port left in the bottle”. Port wine is red.

Nice. Except I prefer Tawny Port, but I'll still remember it.

I think "there's some red port left in the bottle" would be better ; the negation kinda made me think "red" (or "port") was NOT "left".

From memory the No Red Port Left is also about Red on Red passing for ships

Port wine (in a decanter) is also traditionally passed to the left when being poured.

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.

It's unfortunate that some headphones have a red "(R)" symbol to mark the right side, which is the opposite of the red = port convention.

Left is larboard (starts with L), which isn't starboard. So starboard is right. When you're facing the prow, of course!

Or simply StaRRRboard is right

PoRRRt!

Never heart an ORRR from a pirate.

probably not very politically correct anymore, but "You Write with your Right"

(also righty tighty, lefty loosey)

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