I have a hard time with my right and left. That’s due to the stroke I had three year ago. Seems to take a second or two longer to think which is which.
I do - it’s to differentiate between “right” as a direction, and “right” as the antonym of “wrong”.
Norwegian does, though much less frequently. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “Take a right hand turn” in Norwegian, you’d just say “take a right” or similar, but it’s common to say “And then it’s the first house on the right hand.” and “the first house on the right” doesn’t scan, you’d have to use “the first house on the right side”. “First turn to the right” on the other hand would be just fine.
I think this is a reasonable question, and I’ve been a little disappointed at how few of the responses have been proper FQ-style answers.
But I think that posters who have speculated that it’s to clarify that one is talking about right or left directions, as opposed to other senses of these words, are correct.
However, I’ve wondered if there’s another reason: if people sometimes use “the left-hand side” to distinguish between what’s on the observer’s left vs. what’s on the object’s left. If you’re looking at the Mona Lisa and talking about what’s on the left-hand side of the painting, it’s going to be to Mona Lisa’s own right.
Agreed. I’m not sure all of these things come into being because of any intentional clarity, but they don’t even need to - they can just evolve. Language that works is more likely to persist than language that works less well.
I encounter quite a lot of exasperated complaint about verbosity and redundancy on my videos, from people who apparently think some example of speech should be expressed in simpler or more terse form. In most cases, they haven’t really thought it through and a lot of the time, they are simply unaware of the prevalence of these patterns, including in their own speech, indeed, often even in the very complaint they write about my redundancy.
To me, that doesn’t really work, because context makes clear that you are using “right” in the sense of direction, not “correct.” You would almost never say something is on the “correct” side of the street. The only situation I could think of is, perhaps, “if you see the house with the red awning, you’re on the right side of the street.” But in a simple: “the house is on the right side of the street,” it can only refer to direction. And why can’t “right hand” equally mean “correct hand” if we’re saying this is to avoid ambiguity?
Driving is only a subset of the contexts where ‘right hand’ and ‘left hand’ are used.
Also, why is ‘side’ even in the above sentence? If it’s on the right, it’s on the side. I mention this only to underline my point above; redundancy is everywhere; it’s built in.
Obviously. I was responding to the post that I made and the context I was speaking in. With walking, running, jogging, biking, my usage of the words remains the same.
“Side” does not have to be there. I’m – once again – speaking on how I would say it and that I don’t say it to avoid confusion but because that’s how I must’ve heard it said. Of course redundancy is important in communication and not a bete noire as some people seem to think.
“We have alternate day parking for street sweeping, so make sure that you are parking on the right side of the street.”
To me, without further qualifier, would mean directional right. If somebody is using that structure to mean “correct,” they’ve done a poor job of communicating. Now, like I said above in how I would talk, I would say “right-hand side of the street” out of habit.
It can mean ‘correct’ when referring to things that also have chirality, and that might be confusing - ‘put your boots on the right feet’ for example, might imply that you have more than one right foot. None of it is a perfect system.
In that situation you might want to use east/west, north/south to avoid a parking ticket.
And obviously you are already on a street, so that’s unnecessary.
And you know that you are looking for a house, so so is that.
Anything more than, “On right.” is unnecessarily verbose.
Some days it’s the west side, some days it’s the east side, but everyday, it’s the *right * side.
But never the right “hand” side. 
I know you’re kidding, but this is actually a really lovely illustration of why redundancy is so useful. If everyone has the same mind, redundancy is a waste, but for communication between two people whose thoughts are not exactly aligned already, it’s the thing that makes communication actually work.
I’ve worked with people who seemed oblivious to the idea that not everyone else in the vicinity was aware of the context that was in their heads; they would say things like “When I press M, Martin appears, can you sort it out?”
Press M on what? Where? What do you even mean by ‘Martin appears’? Why is this even a problem? What do you want me to do? What’s wrong with Martin?
(What they meant was “When I press M on my computer, while typing an email address in Outlook, the email addresses offered in the autocomplete list include Martin, who has left the company. Can you remove him from the list?”, but that’s a lot of words.)
Which is why we have various error correction built into the language, making us more verbose than what is necessary to get information across.
If you say, “right hand side of the street”, then I know that I should park on that side. If you say, “right side of the street”, then I would ask which is the correct side.
I would say “right hand side of the street” most likely, but I may give you a raised eyebrow if you ask me which is the correct side if I used the construction “right side of the street” and say, “well, I said right, didn’t I?” It just wouldn’t occur to me that anyone would use the word “right” to mean “correct” there, but I guess it’s a good thing I probably default to “right hand” in that case.
In the UK, we drive on the left. Left is the right side. The right side is wrong.
The front passenger door is on the left. If you get in the left side, that’s the right side for a passenger to be so if you sit in the left seat, that’s the right seat. If you are a passenger and you sit in the right seat, you’re in the wrong seat. If you are the driver and the passenger gets in first, you sit in the one seat that is left, which is on the right.
It’s been left-hand and right-hand for hundreds of years, so blame your ancestors for acting childish, I guess.