It’s better to use port and starboard for vehicles anyway.
Well, they’re on the other side of the world, so naturally east and west are swapped for them.
Definitely not a mistake:
https://riichi.wiki/Jikaze
https://japanesemahjong.com/determine_seating/
One cute story I have heard is that you are playing in the celestial compass.
Ah, thank you. The confusion is that the seating is not by compass direction, but by wind direction. The direction of a wind is determined by its source, not its destination.
Huh?
left/right in a vehicle is always reckoned when facing in the same direction the vehicle normally travels. Towards the front of a car, nose of an airplane, the bow of a ship, etc.
True, but @a6ka97 does have a point. So there’s a universal agreement on how we define the left and right side of a vehicle for most purposes, fine. Like “left front tire”. But now imagine an instruction manual for engine maintenance that says:
Open the hood, and over on the left side of the engine near the coolant reservoir you will find the frizzlefrazz …
What is “left” in this context? Surely it’s relative to what you’re facing as you stand in front of the engine. It’s no longer in reference to the vehicle as a whole, but to a component.
Isn’t this precisely why we invented “starboard” and “port”? I always get annoyed when the train announces that the doors will open on the left, because that’s relative to where the listener is standing. They mean “port,” which is relative to the position of the moving train.
Surely you’re wrong. Everything is (or should be) referenced to the vehicle, not the POV of the observer. The left side of the engine is the side on the vehicles’ left. Not your personal left when standing wherever you might be standing facing whichever direction you might be facing.
Note that your left and right also swap when you’re on your back on a creeper under the car. Or looking up at it from it a pit or under a lift.
It’s never smart to reference anything beyond your own body to personal body-centric coordinates.
Ironically, most of the time when I see ships docked in port, they are docked on the starboard side. Not disagreeing with you, but just a curious fact that dates back to at least the 19th century and originated as “larboard” long before then. I keep the distinction separate with my little ditty “communists (leftists) drink wine (port)”.
Nope. They mean the vehicle’s left. Whether you’re facing aft, or sideways, or forward, or laying down on your back, it’s up to you to translate “vehicle left” to your personal orientation. Which will be changing as you move through the train and out the exit.
Yes, but we have a specific and separate word that means “the vehicle’s left.” Why use the ambiguous one when you could use the precise one?
Don’t call me Shirley! 
But it must Shirley be obvious that when standing in front of a car engine under an open hood, instructions regarding “left” and “right” would at best be ambiguous. A statement like “the frizzlefrazz is on the right side” could be confounding when it’s on your left as you view the engine.
I checked a bunch of random maintenance instructions and all the ones I checked get around this ambiguity by referencing “driver side” or “passenger side” instead. Which is something I’ve been doing for years when giving instructions to mechanics precisely to avoid this kind of ambiguity.
Which terms are only used on boats & ships, not airplanes, trains, or cars. Nor stadiums. Nor any other large building where the orientation of the people in it is random.
I’d bet half of Americans could not tell you what “port” or “starboard” mean.
That wouldn’t fix it, nor does “which side of the table” vs. “which way the person is facing”. Though it being a sky map would. Or if, for some insane reason, “east” and “west” mean what side of the table you’re on, but “north” and “south” mean what side you’re facing.
@a6ka97 , “stage left” is “left from the point of view of someone standing on stage”, i.e., the audience’s right.
But I’ll confess that I’m not entirely sure which side is “left field” and “right field”. I think that right field is on the first-base side and left field is on the third-base side (i.e., the batter’s left and right), but I’m not confident about that.
You got it. It’s labeled from the POV of home plate looking out onto the field. Which puts right field on the first base side. See CardinalDimensions - Baseball field - Wikipedia.
That’s right, because references to “stage left” or “stage right” are in the context of instructions to the performers and have nothing to do with what the audience sees.
I agree with @LSLGuy that “left” and “right” in reference to a vehicle always refers to facing in its direction of normal travel. But it really does get ambiguous when working on an engine from the front end. Maybe not to a robot, but humans tend to see left and right from their own perspective, not from some fixed reference point.
You are right, I believe, on the first count. But the spellchecker confusion does not arise in Spanish or German.
BTW: When working as an interpreter I often do have to pause and mentally orient myself using a similar technique as Wolfpup described one post up to get it right.
Several posts later, not related to the last statement:
There are English speaking countries that have the driver and the passenger on the wrong side of the car. Wrong from the perspective of the other countries. You would have to translate those maintenance manuals into the other country’s “language” by swapping just two words. I doubt it would work error free.
The direction of travel (never mind reverse gear, all you nitpickers!) seems more safe and unambiguous.
Nitpick (or perhaps, more specifically): it’s from the point of view of someone on stage facing the audience. So if you have your back to the audience for any reason, left and right are reversed.
Well, yes, but I was taking it as given that performers usually face the audience, and it provides an easy way to remember it.
Yep. That’s one of those implicit assumptions that’s unrealized until someone else doesn’t know the convention. “Of course the winds are named for the region of the sky they’re from,” one thinks, “where else would the origins of the winds be?” And then one realizes that most people get their weather info from maps with a point of view from above. Our words can really lag common experience.