Argentinian comic strip Mafalda only ran for ten years but has been a cultural reference pretty much since its beginning. My parents had all ten books (one per year), and in one of them the family’s vacation and Christmas are right after each other. That had me thoroughly confused for years: everything else seemed to be in order, why not those two groups of strips.
It was only years after learning about the different seasons on both hemisphere that things didn’t so much click as CLONK.
When I was five or six, my grandmother used the phrase “keep your eyes peeled”. It wasn’t until a random aha moment in my early twenties that I finally thought of my eyelids as like a banana peel or the skin of a grape, you know, something you could peel. Made me feel pretty slow on the uptake.
But would such a person be illiterate, or need to try to read any text in both directions before finding only left to right direction is meaningful?
People who have trouble distinguishing left right are almost never direction blind to this degree.
There might be some ways. e.g. the weak force is not p-symmetric. So there might be hypothetical experiments where given a couple known directions (like “down” i.e. towards the nearest significant mass) one could define left and right.
Also you could maybe use a chemistry experiment (optical isomers).
Agree it’s complicated though compared to defining other terms.
I’m certainly literate, in fact I was an early reader, but as it turns out most of the early readers in my class had problems remembering which hand to use for physics’ “rule of thumb”. Knowing in what direction to read * and seeing both hands as having an “L shape” when you hold tumb and index straight out are by no means contradictory. I’m 50 and I still handle my cutlery randomly.
If it makes you feel any better I had never thought through the meaning of that expressed until now.
If you know how to read English, then right is the direction your eye moves to read new words, only going to
the left when you finish a line.
If it makes you feel any better, I was well into middle age before I finally got the “Time flies…” joke.
When I was seven or eight, I got really frustrated when my parents wouldn’t explain what was so funny about Pierre, the dehydrated Frenchman. I was a teenager before I figured it out.
There have been many things I’ve learned here at the Dope. A recent example is the arrow on the gas gauge indicating which side the tank is. It would have helped when I was traveling and renting cars frequently.
Also, it matters whether you have your palms facing inwards or outwards and I can’t say whether either is more natural to me.
hang on, what is the point of such a class if that pretty crucial detail is not plainly stated?
I tell right from left by thinking of which hand I use to write. As a kid I needed to mimic writing. I very frequently say “right” while pointing to the left, or the other way around, when I don’t think first, for instance when giving directions.
I was well into my forties when I saw “courage” in the word “encourage” and realized that it literally meant “give courage to.” :smack:
I don’t recall exactly what age, but I think I was well into my teens / possibly early 20s when I learned that the Eiffel Tower isn’t black. It was actually really disappointing.
Don’t worry, I was nearly 50 when I read this and learned it. :eek:
You learn something new every day. Not sure what I’ll do for the rest of the day.
Don’t be discouraged. Go boldly forth.
You’re missing the point. If you have access to written text, that’s telling you left from right, it’s no different from having the word “left” tattooed on your left hand.
But the supposed “mnemonic” approach of holding up your hands and seeing that the finger and thumb of the left hand make an L is different. Drawing an L correctly requires you to know left from right in the first place. So somebody who was truly left-right blind could not use that mnemonic. Which is the train of thought that leads to the thought experiment of how you’d communicate L-R to aliens.
The reason the problem of communicating L/R to an alien* is that parity violation experiments are the only way to be sure, based only on the assumption that the laws of physics are the same for them. The abundance of chiral biological molecules might not be the same for alien biology, that’s arbitrary so far as we know.
*under the assumption that we have no common access to anything like looking at the same galaxy, we can’t send them anything physical like polarized EM etc., we have to tell them an operational definition, some experiment they can do.