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Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
361–370 of 636 posts
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#362I wish they gave or examples as to why simple left and right would be confusing, and how port and starboard are different and better. Maybe because I'm from a landlocked country, but this article didn't help me understand the why .
Imagine ten sailors on a ship, each facing a different direction and trying to coordinate their actions by shouting ‘left’ and ‘right’ to each other. - Turn it left, no, I mean the ship’s left, not my left!
You could just shout ship's left or boat's left or shorten those to shleft or something, more intuitive than all those old terms
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#363There's kind of a fun brain teaser related to this. Imagine you're speaking to an entirely alien species in another dimension. And you're trying to describe "left" to them. It's impossible. I say it's a brain teaser only because this sounds highly improbable at first. Forwards and backwards can be described, and even up/down if we assume basic fundamental rules remain the same. Yet left and right? It seems impossible…
Not sure I understand. Directions are relative. I'd describe "left" how I describe every other direction.
How would you describe it?
One approach would be: you're moving along a straight line, perpendicular to a large body that attracts you through gravity.
Now "down" is towards the gravity, "up" is the opposite direction, and "left" and "right" are perpendicular, but which one is left and right, if you cannot rely on handedness?
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#364I wish they gave or examples as to why simple left and right would be confusing, and how port and starboard are different and better. Maybe because I'm from a landlocked country, but this article didn't help me understand the why .
No different than a house - you don't refer to the Left Wing, but the West Wing.
Where is West?
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It just seems like an old convention that has stuck, seem'm much simpler to anyone not familiar with ships to say 'ships left' or 'ships right' than to have new words. We don't do this with cars. You have a left rear door, not a port rear door.
I guess some could argue that we do have some special vocabulary for cars too.
E.g. you don't call it the front/back door, you call it the bonnet/boot (or maybe hood/trunk depending where you're from) though that probably is stretching the definition of a door a little bit... but then you also have nearside and offside for passengers/drivers side, though that's probably a bit more of a technical term.
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#366When 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.
This would probably throw my girlfriend off. She has some kind of right/left dyslexia. When she's driving and I'm giving directions I have to tell her "short turn" or "long turn". Long turn being left, longer because it's across a lane, right turns are shorter. But if someone told her that left is shorter than right for remembering purposes, it would probably mess her up more when following driving directions.
My driving instructor had short pieces of colored tape on the beams between the windshield and side windows.
He would say to people with such problem "turn in the next left blue" every time.
So when they got to their test and and the tester will say to them "turn in the next right" their brain will add a "red" and they will look it up in the car and find it on the right beam.
He claimed it usually solved the issue.
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think I can, maybe. However I’m a radiographer and pictures like this are my job. 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.
I fully agree with you. I was mostly posting as an example that "left is the patient's left" is not sufficient without other standards (like image orientation).
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#368I wish they gave or examples as to why simple left and right would be confusing, and how port and starboard are different and better. Maybe because I'm from a landlocked country, but this article didn't help me understand the why .
Left and Right didn't have their modern meaning back then. In Old English riht meant straight, as in direct or not bent. It later assumed the meaning of correct as in right and wrong. Lyft meant weak. Their reference to handedness seems to have been incidental. It seems odd to us to talk about the 'straight' and 'weak' hand, but to them it made sense, but maybe not to talk about the 'straight' or 'weak' sides of a boat.
The concept of left and right hands was not commonly used historically. During the English Civil War many recruits didn't know which hand or foot was left or right. During marching training instructors used to stick some hay in one boot and straw in the other for each recruit and call out "Hay, Straw, Hay, Straw".
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also pretty cool that a ton of sailing vocabulary has made its way into common English vernacular. I guess with the UK being the most powerful country in the world at one time (and projecting their power via their Navy) it's not too surprising.
What are some examples? I am English but I know nothing about the maritime world, so I likely know the words as slang/vernacular terms but not what they mean on a ship.
In Malaysian/Singaporean English there's a term: gostan (read "go stun"), which means to reverse. I was curious about it's etymology and went to research it. It came from "go astern", with "astern" being the back of a ship. I imagine this must be a phrase the English speaking colonists must have used quite a lot in the 17th century
Re: Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
#370It'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…
In french theatre has specific words for left and right. Côté cour et Côté jardin. Courtside and garden side. In geography left and right banks of a river are always in the direction of the flow
In one of Tim Snyders Yale lectures on Ukrainian history, goes overboard about the left bank/right bank in respect of the Dniepro. The river runs north to south, so the right bank is basically the west. I strongly suspect he has trouble telling his left from his right; I've read an essay in which there is a map with a small patch of Russia (coloured red) in the bottom-left, but the caption says it's bottom-right.
I suspect the reason he made a meal of this subject (and the reason he insists on using the left/right terminology) is because he finds it challenging.
I learned it with the Seine, in Paris: the left bank is to the south of the right bank. It's also where the bulk of the 1968 political protest happened; the protestors were leftists. The Seine generally flows south to north, emptying into the English Channel.