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To rig something up, to go overboard, to leave something in your wake.
It's interesting that farming/agriculture and sailing both have left the legacy of their words into the language. It goes to show how important these industries are to civilization.
Without farming/sailing we'd go 20000 years back
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For stage directions there's also "House Left" and "House Right", which are from the perspective of the audience.
And in broadcast it can be referred to as 'Camera Left' and 'Camera Right', which is also from the audience perspective.
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I don't know, when you're talking about "the right arm", it seems obvious that it's the patient's right arm and not the arm that you see on your right when you're looking at the patient. I don't think you need to go to medical school to understand that.
You're right that "the left lung" should obviously be the lung on the patient's left. However, can you look at the image below and immediately identify which is the "left" lung? https://scratch.rprosperoglobal.duckdns.org/lungs.png
The orientation is screwed up and images should almost never be displayed like this.
If the patient’s organs are in non-standard locations (situs inversus, dextrocardia etc), something very bad will happen when orientations are messed with. Use standard orientations and label the images.
That's why.
It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.) At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical s…
If you're inside a ship, it's often hard to say what way around you are: "left" and "right" have utility for the perspective of a person onboard. Port and starboard are the onboard equivalent of North/South/East/West when walking on land, especially if you're inside a building with no windows for external reference. This is unlike for a doctor, where it's obvious which side is which: you can see the patient.
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> Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat. Understatement of the week... pretty much everything on a boat has a different word for it. Often for practical reasons, sometimes purely traditional reasons. It is nice because it binds one to nautical tradition leading back centuries/millenia.
One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla. Words that refer to older things have more…
When I was a kid in Minnesota we needed to learn port/starboard and the colors red/green. A trick that helped me remember is that "LEFT", "PORT", and "RED" are all the shorter words and "RIGHT", "STARBOARD", and "GREEN" are the longer words in the respective pairs. FWIW.
I was taught the mnemonic “There’s no red port left in the bottle”. Port wine is red.
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A toilet on a boat is called a head because it was historically placed at the front of the boat. You’ll still hear folks say “hit the head” referring to using the restroom.
And it was put at the front of the boat because that was downwind of everything else on a wind powered boat.
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One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla. Words that refer to older things have more…
> windmill = molino I don't know Spanish, but "molino" looks like French "moulin", which is a mill; a windmill is "moulin a vent". So I reckon "very different" is an exaggeration.
Modern English lost the "n" part, but it was present in Middle English, milne.
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How many of these have common non-nautical uses? I don't think I ever use any of these terms, or hear anyone else use them, in common speech.
I hear people use "at the helm" and "change tack" to mean being in charge of something and changing direction or approach, respectively. People also "hitch themselves" to things, although I'm not sure that comes directly from the nautical usage.