Fairly recently, I was asked by someone in my department, who had to call a business in Ireland, if I knew what the country code for Ireland was. I said “Republic, or Northern Ireland?”
He was confused. He didn’t know there was a difference.
Oh, and a follow-up: Lots of people at my firm ask from time to time “what country is Singapore in?”
I guess that’s not actually a totally stupid question, because city-states are kind of an anomaly in today’s world. But it’s kind of surprising because the firm has an office in Singapore.
Umm, I don’t quite remember. I think so, because I’m not shy of saying so and we worked together for about 5 years. But even still, a lawyer should know better.
No, I’m sure. I said something like “Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland?”, and he said something like “I didn’t know there was a difference.” And we all knew what city the business was located in – it was, and still is, a regular vendor to my firm, and our department in particular.
He wasn’t (isn’t) a stupid or uneducated person. This was just some fact he’d never come across before.
I was also confused/amused when in the movie Titanic, to try to avoid the iceberg, the order was given “hard to starboard!!” and the ship (eventually) turned left.
The order is for the direction of the rudder control, as I recall. Push to starboard, rudder moves to port, ship turns to port. Counter intuitive, but pretty sure that’s the deal.
That’s not the kind of detail a maniac control freak like Cameron would get wrong. In fact he’ll leave it “accurate but confusing.”
In 1980 or so, I was having a rubber stamp made. The rubber stamp company (yes, this was a brick-and-mortar business back then) had no idea what “uppercase” and “lowercase” were. Finally I suggested “big letters and little letters”–that they recognized.
To understand this one you have to know that it happened way back in the Time of Dinosaurs when reports were printed on paper with ink. I put together a database of widgets that were held up in the production process for one reason or another. It was called the “On Hold Report.” One day, a young marketing assistant asked why a particular widget was still on the On Hold Report. She said that she had taken care of it that morning but it was still on the list. I looked at the paper she was holding and explained that her report was printed two days ago and that if she would print the current report her widget would no longer be on the list. She said that wasn’t good enough, she wanted the paper she was holding in her hand to be up-to-date. Rather than try to explain further I just told her I was sorry and that I could not help her.
I suppose in modern times the report could be on a mobile device connected to a wireless network and be updated automatically so she could now have what she wanted.
In golf a hook goes off to the left, a slice goes off to the right. ‘Left’ and ‘hook’ have 4 letters, ‘right’ and ‘slice’ have 5 letters. Mainly I just remember that my drives hook and I have to turn a little to the right to adjust for that. If I cared about golf I might try to learn how to drive the ball straight, but I don’t.
There is no REDPORT wine LEFT, it has all gone down my THROAT.
From a dinghy sailing instruction book, many years ago.
The mainsail throat halyard is cleated on the port side of the mast (it raises the inner end of the gaff. The peak halyard, on the starboard side, raises the outer end).
If you want to make things really confusing for bilingual/bi-cultural people, in the German speaking world „Bühne links“ („stage left“) and „Bühne rechts“ („stage right“) mean the exact opposite. German uses the audience’s perspective, whereas the English terms use the actor’s perspective looking towards the audience. So if you’re working in a German theatre with a German crew, be sure not to mix up your languages, or something could go very wrong indeed. Kind of like driving on the wrong side of the road.
Okay, that settles it. I can never be a ship’s captain/pilot, work in the German theater, or drive in the UK. No prob. The world will be a safer place with me at home.
Something I remember from way back in my childhood (maybe MAD magazine?): “Port” has the same number of letters as “Left”, so Port = Left. For Starboard, you have a choice of two directions and you’ve already used one, so the other one is left. Therefore Starboard = Left.
For me, that is too many thinking steps. For example, if a sign says in words, “No left turn,” I have learned what that means without having to think about it or interpret it. It means I can’t turn that way.
However, this sign has always given me trouble:
I finally figured out what the problem is. When I see that sign, my brain does NOT say, “Don’t do this.” Au contraire, it says, “It’s okay to do the opposite of this sign.” Then I have to figure out what the action is, what the opposite of it is, therefore what’s okay to do, and by then, people behind me are honking.
The inside of my head is a garden of unending delight. I mean it.
I’ve had to explain my mnemonic for this to PhD students:
Hook comes before Slice in alphabetical order, so Hook is to the left and Slice is to the right.
Similarly, when the wind shifts direction, it can back or veer. Back is when it starts coming more from the left (when you face the wind) and veer is when it starts coming more from the right. As in hook-slice, Back comes before Veer alphabetically, hence the left - right.
Unrelated to directions, here is another one I find that people in any setting…corporate, education, you name it…get wrong: They mix up standard and daylight time.
Emails from them typically say “…event starts at 4PM EST” when it is in the middle of summer and EDT would be the correct time zone. When I have a chance to “teach” such people (usually I don’t) I offer a suggestion they instead say “…eastern time” so as to sidestep the S or D which they usually get wrong. Of course this works because for the most part, everybody who does switch over to daylight savings time does it at about the same time. (I worked in an international office where I found an exception to this once.)
They also use DST which gives you no clue what time zone they are talking about. It gets worse as you have to deal with duplicated and non-existing time/dates that result from DST and the varying international scheduling differences.
