This. It was a grand revelation for me when I first learned of that other trick of counting out the months on your fingertips to tell how many days.
I’d always done the knuckles.
Norwegian also lacks that confusion. The word for “right (as opposed to left)” is etymology related to comfortable, but not in a way that’s obvious to a modern speaker. I had to look it up and was expecting to find a connection to “high”.
Me, too. I also use the rhyme, which works for me, despite there being no good reason for it to do so.
I mean, it doesn’t.
But at the same time, I can still tell you the names of all 8 of Santa’s reindeer because of that song. If you asked me to list them off, I’d have to sing it to myself.
It does though. Because humans have the ability to memorize lists, even when they’re not rhyming or set to melody. The “30 days hath September” might not work a lot better than just memorizing the list “April, June, September, November”, plus the rules and whole February business, but it’s also not harder and has the benefit of packaging the whole lesson in one poem for kids learning about the irregular number of days in a month.
That said it’s not really a thing in Norway and I originally just learned the knuckles rule, though these days, when in doubt, I count off from a month I’m sure of.
I was more pointing out that it doesn’t really make any sense that a rhyme would help in remembering things that don’t really rhyme, and that many of them can be interchanged without affecting either rhyme or meter.
I didn’t say it doesn’t work, given my example of a much more useless thing that I can remember through its associated song. It’s just weird that it does, at all.
In some situations “on right” might be sufficient, but in giving directions I think it would be too easy for someone to get confused and take another right turn (in the case of a street), or think it’s something adjacent to the object, not on the right side of the object (in the case of a building, say).
So I think “on right” goes too far the other way.
I wasn’t aware of that. In the UK you give way to your right, whether that driver is already on the roundabout or also entering the roundabout. Yeah it would be weird if in two similar situations priority is different.
I agree, but it does convey in the minimalist terms what is needed to know.
To avoid confusion or misunderstanding, we employe redundancies in our language.
To be clear, roundabouts have the same priority system in the US, the vehicle already on the roundabout has priority. But obviously whereas UK roundabouts go clockwise, we go around roundabouts anticlockwise. So on US roundabouts the vehicle with priority is on the left of the vehicle entering.
Whereas at 4-way junctions (which don’t exist in the U.K.) the vehicle on the right has priority.
No, I followed you, I guess I flubbed the response.
What I mean is, in the UK, priority is always to the right in all situations, including 4-way stops (which actually do exist, but are about as rare as roundabouts in the US (also, they tend to be in remote locations. I think a busy 4-way stop, without traffic lights, would be absolute carnage)).
So I was agreeing that one priority rule for roundabouts and another for 4 way stops would be pretty confusing.
Nitpick: priority at 4-way stops goes to the vehicle that arrived first. Vehicle on the right is a tie-breaker for when two vehicles get there at the same time. A lot of people apparently have forgotten this, since many expect me to go first on my bicycle when they have right-of-way. I always wait them out.
Roundabouts are getting much more common in the US while I doubt 4-way stops are getting more common in the UK. Right now there’s over 8,000 roundabouts in the US with about 500 being built every year. At this rate, in about half a century or so, we’ll catch up to Britain (by which point the UK will have built more too, but we’ll ignore that).
In Spanish, “left hand turn” would be "vuelta a la mano izuierda.“On the right hand side,” would be “a la mano derecha.”
I have not forgotten, I did give this full account of 4-way stops in the earlier post that began that exchange.
I wonder if some of these are drivers who have heard of the Idaho Stop and don’t understand it correctly? Although a lot of US drivers just don’t seem to grasp the idea of bicycles being treated as vehicles, which can go to both extremes - treating you as a pedestrian they should allow to cross, or running you off the road because they think you’re not entitled to be there.
Unlikely. The Idaho stop has only been in effect here in Oregon for 2 or 3 years, but people have been doing this for a long time. And I suspect most people, including cyclists, are unaware it’s even the law. Most likely it’s a misplaced courtesy.
Very true, on both counts.
I know an adult woman of average intelligence and above average pulchritude who, when driving, has to hold up her left and right hands and trace the “L” created by her left before completing a left turn.
If you wanna message her and call her a retard, send me a PM and I’ll shoot you her email.
There’s a nice piece in the movie Carry On Cleo which includs the Roman invasion of Britain.
It has the Roman seargent (? Legionnaire? Not sure which) shouting at his troops 'Dexter! Sinister! Dexter! Sinister! Halt! You ‘orrible bunch of no-hopers…’ etc
Just to complicate things further, in heraldry, “dexter” means “right”, and “sinister” means “left”.
But it’s the right and left of the person holding the shield, not the person viewing the shield.
I’m not sure anyone needs to know any mnemonic or song to remember the days in the month, really. As long as you know one month, you know them all, and everyone knows February has 28 or 29 days, so is a short month.
.
Starting with January, the months go long-short-long-short, etc, with one exception - July and August are both long, supposedly due to, basically, competitiveness between the Caesars they were named after. Or you could just remember that they’re part of the long summer vacation.
Might not work for everyone, but it worked for me.
Unlikely that this is the reason - July and August got their current lengths of 31 days each in Caesar’s calendar reform of 45 BC. The renaming of the two months after Caesar and Augustus took place after that (one year later for July, 37 years later for August).