“Turn widdershins! I mean deosil dammit!”
I suppose that this is a wrong thing to do (comment on a mod) but, is his/her serial snark necessary too? The OP asked a factual question and we have one person offering nothing but sarcasm.
The more you look, the more examples of this sort of thing you will find:
- ‘12 midnight/noon’ when ‘midnight/noon’ would do
- one and the same
- each and every
- shorter in length
- advance warning
- plan ahead
- end result
- mix together
- past history
- …
English is jam-packed with unnecessary redundancy
Not just English. Any language*— indeed, any effective means of communication.
It’s because communication is imperfect. Sound travels through air, things are noisy, and ears aren’t perfect machines.
(Linguist John McWhorter explains this well, as so others, I’m sure).
*e.g., French for “what’s that?” Is “what is that which it is?”
Yes, I struggle with right and left too, and it’s not because I’m mentally different or childish. I actually do a quick look at my hand and see my wedding ring to verify “left”.
I don’t say right hand or left hand myself, but find it no more childish than just saying right or left. It’s just a different version of the same idea.
Called, in some (though not all) of your instances, a hendiadys.
Languages are imperfect and most contain some redundancy. “Left hand turn” is an example of redundancy. Much like saying “the truck is a red color”.
A further example is requiring nouns and adjectives to agree in number - is this really necessary? That you need to say “one plate” vs. “two plates”? Well… no actually it isn’t. In English you have constructions like “one fish” and “two fish”, or “one deer” and “two deer”. Some languages don’t alter the adjectives to reflect number at all.
All languages have a certain number of redundant or quirky traits, some a legacy of the past and some just… well, we don’t know why but the trait is there. Human languages are imperfect, just like humans.
I had an assistant who was like that. She would do the same thing. She also couldn’t mentally flip maps over and follow directions, but she was damn smart in other ways.
She liked to claim that the only reason she hadn’t shown her husband the door was because a divorce would rob her of her only surefire method of telling directions. Of course Japanese like to joke like that.
I also struggle with sense of direction and mentally rotating objects, myself.
A difficulty with this approach is that you have to know which way an L goes and remember whether to look at your palm or the back of your hand. Both of which I struggled with when I was . . . young. Let’s just say young.
If I am giving directions, I would say: “Turn left at the church,” but I might also add: “Watch out for the potholes on the left-hand side.”
With cars, we often used to talk about ‘nearside’ and ‘offside’. Many people were confused, so the modern parlance is ‘driver’s side’ and ‘passenger side’.
Then you get a car/people from a country that is right hand drive and they get confused.
From childhood to a young adult I had issues with right hand/left hand. A coworker had a simple solution I still use today–
Wedding rings are worn on your left hand. He told me the saying “lefty lovey, righty flighty” as to where the ring was on a woman (or man) and their marital status. I still catch myself when somebody says right or left and looking down and glancing at my wedding ring to confirm which direction is right or left.
You yourself pointed out that there are countries with left-hand traffic (and consequently right-hand drive). The same goes for wedding bands: In some continental European countries, it is customary to wear them on the right hand. Typically, in those countries engagement rings are (if they are worn at all) worn on the left hand, and in some regions there is the custom of using the same ring as engagement and wedding ring and then switching it to the other hand during the wedding ceremony. The situation is a bit in flux here because the Anglo-American wedding-ring-goes-on-the-left-hand rule is gaining ground as a result of cultural influence from films and TV shows, but the point is that using wedding rings as a mnemonic to tell right from left is no less culturally dependent than the side you drive your car on.
Years ago I took up the hobby of flying radio-controlled gliders. Friends with relevant experience warned me of the difficulty of correctly steering the plane left or right when it’s coming toward you, but for some reason it was never an issue for me.
Regardless of who I’m talking to, I give directions as “right” or “left”, but not out of any sense of technical nitpickery; it’s just what I grew up with.
There are other contexts where I’ve never heard anybody use anything but “right-hand/left-hand” to indicate direction, even though hands have little to do with it. A couple of prominent examples:
Screw thread chirality nomenclature goes to handedness because of the right-hand rule, but there are perfectly valid alternatives we could have used instead:
True, but see my previous post. Because talking and hearing are noisy and imperfect, redundancy in language is a feature, not a bug.
(And yes, spoken language IS language, until recently in human history, and still is for many people in the world.)
Just wanted to say thanks. I never thought of spoken and written language that way before, what a fascinating way of conceptualizing words and the use of them.
Ok hijack over
But of course, as @Ruken noted, if your mother had complete right/left “blindness” this wouldn’t work, because she needs to know left from right in order to know how to draw an “L”. If we got into remote communication with distant aliens, with no shared point of reference (we cannot both see the same galaxies), we might face this problem - could they derive which side we mean by “right” from the results of any experiment they could do locally?
(This is probably not such a convenient method for your mother.)
My mother was ambidextrous and had the same issue, with the same solution. My father was strongly right-handed and could not understand why she needed to do that.
Yep it may be another British vs American english thing:
Brit here, I can’t recall the last time I heard left-hand or right-hand in terms of direction.
I do hear the left hand side to refer to a portion / section of something, but I would say that just saying “the left side” is probably more common, especially for young people.
Yes, this is probably how my usual language usage patterns are. I normally use a plain “left” or “right,” like for turns, but it’s not unlikely I’d say something like, “the house is on the right hand side.” Why? I dunno. Just sounds and feels right to me. I assume I’m just echoing speech as I’ve heard it spoken.
And, no, mixing up left and right or not knowing left and right is not a sign of low intelligence or “retardation.” My wife is a PhD with standardized scores through the roof, and she constantly mixes the two up: she’ll be pointing right and saying “left”. Some people just aren’t wired that way, and it takes some lack of empathy to not recognize this.