I now worry that very little brain fart is prodromal. Mostly my brain seems to work better than ever, but self-awareness can be the first thing to go.
Anyway, you really need to get your cardinal directions right on the plains.
I'm having trouble making sense of your comment, if that's comforting.
Cardinal directions are what birds use.
I have this bug where I switch a word for its opposite, especially when giving directions. Sometimes I have a nagging feeling, but often I don't... Of the times I have to give directions, it happens probably most of the time.
Oddly, I do this too, although the only things I routinely mix up are "right" and "left". I have no actual confusion about what's right and what's left, but if I'm giving directions I'll regularly say one when I mean the other. It's very weird, but it's comforting to know that someone else seems to share [something sort of like] this same affliction.
2: I think "very" is a typo for "every."
I do this with "purple" and "orange."
And I have no idea why.
I think it's such fun to say ahr-rahnge nasally, but it would be an affectation if I incorporated it into my regular speech because ornge is what I naturally say.
I have an extremely difficult time distinguishing my left from my right. When I have to choose one, under time pressure, I get it wrong about 60% of the time.
I have a niece who shares my affliction, though everyone else in the family probably just thinks we are dumb.
7: You must have some sort of sixth sense, like those people who use magnets to train themselves to sense magnetic fields, but for gravity.
That one is easy to correct. Just hold the index finger and thumb of each hand perpendicular to each other. The one that makes a proper "L" is your left.
(My apologies if this results in your or your niece writing backward "L"s.)
The Hopi would confuse time and space.
If your failure to distinguish left and right is more existential, take the L formed by your fingers and hold it up to your third eye.
Yeah, I know the L trick. But I understand that some people don't have to do the L trick every fucking time and I am not one of those people.
If you wear a watch, you only need to do the L trick in the morning. Then you can do the Watch trick, which is less conspicuous.
10: A friend of mine who is a doctor had this problem in a big way in his real life, because he was so used to describing his patients. We spent a really long time trying to assemble something where he keep trying to screw something on the right side of the grill, because if it were a patient facing him that side would have been left.
Could you try to take a scenario where you presumably are very good at distinguishing left from right--say, which side of the road you drive on, or which hand you write with--and imprint that intuition onto other situations?
Using the front-facing camera on your smartphone, take a picture of yourself holding up your right hand, and then just refer to that picture every time you need to remember.
My smartphone is so old, it doesn't even have a camera that doesn't face the front. In the year 2011, nobody ever thought taking pictures of yourself would hit it big.
By front-facing camera I meant the one on the front of the phone.
That is, the one that faces you as you are holding the phone, but not as I am holding the phone, in my left hand.
Then my phone is so old, it only has a down-facing camera.
My phone has both a leeward camera and a starboard camera.
Could you try to take a scenario where you presumably are very good at distinguishing left from right--say, which side of the road you drive on...
Oh, this would have to be difficult.... I actually own two cars. The Hyundai is located in country in which one drives on the left, and the Nissan is located in a country in which one drives on the right. My first week of driving in either country, after a long spell of driving in the other, I am a dangerously prone to start driving on the wrong side of the road.
And worse than that, I am consistently turning on my windshield wipers when I mean to use the blinker.
"L" is for "leeward" which is the opposite of starboard if you are facing the right direction.
26.1: I'm pretty sure that's a risk for anyone in that situation.
My camera stands athwart my phone, yelling "Click!"
I always have to run through the port/starboard mnemonic in my head before I get those right.
Ah, yeah, forgot that you might be switching back and forth. I make the turn signal/wiper blade mistake when I switch rules-of-the-road, too. And that first week is very scary. I have to ritualize reminding myself what side to drive on.
Spike, my sister has the same problem. We always chalked it up to her left-handedness. Like you, she's wrong a little more than half the time, but not often enough that we could reinterpret instructions as the opposite.
My mixing up words thing is "mushroom" and "marshmallow." Roast mushrooms makes s'mores sound really unappetizing.
My wife as learned, instead of telling me "take a left at that stop sign" when I am in the drivers seat, that its much better for her just to point.
"Who has two thumbs and the best sense of direction of any person in this car?"
I had a friend who needed "my side/your side" directions from passengers.
I have a friend who gets (mock) offended whenever the direction-giving passenger directs him to "go straight". Left and right he is fine with.
I sympathize with the left-right and north-south confusion because it's always happened for me with scientific vocabulary. There's a million cases where there are two varieties of something that are given the easy-to-distinguish names "Type I" and "Type II". Or things like "DNA-A" and "DNA-B". Since it's totally arbitrary which one is Type I and which one is Type II, as far as my mind goes it's impossible to remember which is which. Unless you get the distinction reinforced hundreds of times in your daily life. I have still not spent enough time immersed in statistics to know which is a Type I error and which is a Type II error.
I also occasionally replace a word with another seemingly random word that doesn't even share any phonemes but has similar stresses and grammatical role. The example that my parents make fun of me for is "mailbox" and "washcloth". This happens when sleep-deprived.
I have trouble distinguishing between future and past. Maybe a watch would help. Or a TARDIS.
I also have these sorts of problems. Especially of the sort that ned describes in 38; it's hard to get jargon right.
Specifically I even have trouble with "false positive" and "false negative", since I have to remember what is being made positive or negative.
Could you try to take a scenario where you presumably are very good at distinguishing left from right--say, which side of the road you drive on, or which hand you write with--and imprint that intuition onto other situations?
I do this with playing the piano - my left hand and right hand are the most distinguishable there, and so I can bail myself out of situations when I'd otherwise have to pause.
There's a million cases where there are two varieties of something that are given the easy-to-distinguish names "Type I" and "Type II". Or things like "DNA-A" and "DNA-B". Since it's totally arbitrary which one is Type I and which one is Type II, as far as my mind goes it's impossible to remember which is which.
I think one of the biggest reasons that students have trouble with sequences and series in Cal II is that the words are used interchangeably in everyday English.
I have a manual version of a similar issue -- if there are two similarly sized and oriented things on a shelf, and I want one of them, I will surprisingly often grab the wrong one even if I'm looking right at them. This is usually books, but it could be anything so long as they're two of the same thing right next to each other.
Also, if I'm not currently located in a city, my mental map instantly disintegrates. I can instinctually find anything in Austin if I'm driving, with no wrong turns or pauses, but I lost the ability to give directions there, almost immediately. All street names evaporated the moment I moved.
I still remember all the street names of the town where I was raised. That being able to count to ten gets you about half way there is a big help.
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Well, apparently my wife didn't get her root canal pre-approved, so the insurance company is likely to screw us. I guess they don't want to pay for any recreational root canals.
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I have spike's thing, not the root canal the other thing.
recreational root canals.
Belongs in the Clippy thread, no?
38: I have a hard time with biology names that are jumbles of letters. The old Latin names were much easier for me, because I could remember them by their etymology. "450" just isn't the same.
I also have problems with right and left. My mother who also has this problem, taught me to look for the freckle in the middle of my right hand. But my hands have accumulated all kind of marks over the years and the freckle is getting harder and harder to distinguish.
Dental insurance sort of sucks anyway. My root canal was covered and it was still $600 out of pocket. It's basically pre-paying for your check-ups and cleaning and not a whole lot else. Which is why I keep it. Knowing that I've already paid makes me actually go.
51: Prepaying on a pretax basis.
People who have real trouble with the left/right thing puzzle me a bit, because of handedness. I suppose I might mix them up verbally (I don't do it consistently, but I wouldn't claim to never do it, I mix most things up sometimes), but as soon as my body is moving at all, my right hand is the one that I instinctively do anything with (other than reading a paperback. Paperbacks are held in the left hand, pages turned with the thumb, while I lacksidasically wash dishes or something else useful one-handed.)
I couldn't possibly mix my hands up, they're fundamentally differently functioning bodyparts. It'd be like mixing up a hand and a foot.
Which is slightly nice, but does not make it resemble the concept of "insurance".
I'm kind of pissed because I was planning on buying a big-ass TV with the money that's now going for the root canal.
Currently, our TV is too small for an effective game of 8 Player Super Smash Bros.
Did TVs get really cheap or was that a way expensive root canal?
The thing that pisses me off is that our previous insurance company was a Belgian company selling an "international" plan that basically covered you in whatever country you happened to be in, but which has since been bought out by an American insurance company, with is bringing with it all sorts of great new innovations that they have in American-style health insurance. Like dicking people over on dental.
If it makes you feel better, vision insurance is so very much more pointless.
was that a way expensive root canal?
$600 for the root canal, although I am simultaneously getting screwed on vision insurance, which would have kicked in a bit more for the TV fund.
Also, my kid has a cavity. That's coming out of his allowance.
Bitching about vision insurance in 59 before I saw 58.
He's allowed a maximum of one per tooth.
53: That may be part of the issue for me -- I sort of ambidextrous, but mostly just not dexterous at all. I write with my left hand, and use scissors and play racquet sports with my right hand. I throw with either hand, badly.
And I'm really, really non-ambidextrous. Although I did just teach myself to knit backwards (to do entrelac, for Thorn and Smearcase), which required more than I usually expect of my left hand.
I''m not ambidextrous either, but I did teach myself to shoot pool from the left side as well as the right. I'm still not particularly good from either side, but it means I don't have to attempt screwy behind-the-back shots that never work.
Unfortunately, I seemed to have stopped hanging out in pool halls ever since I had a kid, and it will be a few years before he's old enough to hang out in pool halls with me.
54: Most health insurance is only partly insurance in the sense you mean. It's all really prepaid healthcare, since everyone needs healthcare at some point, and there are regular services we all ought to be getting. This is unlike, say, your homeowner's policy which you only use if there's damage to your house.
Ambi with much Ned describe in 38 syndrome. I am often reduced to saying, "I know its binary but I can't remember which is which." Tends to not inspire confidence in listeners.
Clockwise/counter clockwise is one I usually get right, but every once in a while I think about the clock's point-of-view.
Urple's confusion, as expressed in comment 4, is the result of his mirror neurons firing in sympathy with the person he's addressing. The obvious resolution to this interference is, when he's giving directions to someone facing him, to imagine he's guiding them while walking backwards, tour guide style.
The specific thing I seem to be getting worse (and have mentioned here before) at is losing particular words, name (but I always sucked at these), places etc. They literally seem like a hole whose edges I can feel with my mental tongue.
I am, however, wiser with righter opinions than ever.
I'm somewhat ambidextrous. I write with the right, but I throw with the left. I'm left-footed, too, when playing football.
31: The mnemonic is "slice to starboard, hook to port (but only if you're right-handed)". Actually, that would probably work in places with a good deal of golf/boating overlap.
71: And in the Southern Hemisphere.
Heebie's confusion is caused by her anticipating contradiction from her interlocutor and identifying too strongly with them in an attempt to head off conflict. Probably either an over- or under-active amygdala. She should psyche herself up for conversations by imagining that she's a god-like entity whose every thought creates reality.
Sheesh! Tattoo parlor + correct set of knuckles + "L" + "E" + "F" +"T" = Problem Solved. Why do you kids have to make everything so complicated?
I'm the opposite of ambidextrous.
It will be confusing with the "YOLO" that's already there.
Ambi seeks sinister for directional repartee. No Aussies need apply.
As you can see from this picture of me, the real-estate on my knuckles is also otherwise occupied.
And in the Southern Hemisphere
Huh, I didn't know that. I guess getting rogered by your shipmates is your cue to switch over.
especially when giving directions
East and West remain very hard for me out here. Also lately I forget names a lot. My dad does this, so I am only 98% sure I have Early Onset Everything as opposed to the usual 99.
I had a mild version of this problem (had to twitch dominant hand slightly to remind myself that this was "right") until I got a car in my twenties. Further, the Irish-language words for left and right were even less firmly connected to physical direction. Driving a lot finally internalised it.
On the other hand, so to speak, this change also let me nearly-internalise "clockwise" in the horizontal plane as deiseal + slight physical motion, whereas before I had to picture a clock, picture the direction, then flip the imaginary clock from vertical to horizontal.
I have an uncle (native speaker of Irish) who it seems automatically identifies when outdoors which direction is east and which is west, which are referred to much more in (that dialect of) Irish than I ever hear in English. (He grew up in a place where after a shortish distance south was into the sea and north was up the mountains.) Which I suppose brings us around to language and thinking.
I should say, my dad has done this for as long as I can remember, and hasn't, keinahora, gotten any worse. I've thought about asking my mom when it started but giving my mother extra things to worry about in my life is not a good strategy.
I have an uncle (native speaker of Irish) who it seems automatically identifies when outdoors which direction is east and which is west, which are referred to much more in (that dialect of) Irish than I ever hear in English. (He grew up in a place where after a shortish distance south was into the sea and north was up the mountains.) Which I suppose brings us around to language and thinking.
In Samoan, directions are usually central/peripheral (with reference to whatever seems obvious in context, usually a village center) and seaward/landward. Left and right exist, but they're long words and people don't use them much.
84: The way directions are used in Irish confound me. Especially that needing/wanting something is associated with a movement away from the person, e.g. teastaíonn [thing desired] uaim.
turn signal/wiper blade mistake
Yeah I also just can't automate things anymore. I don't automatically push the door lock button the right way, and we've had the car a year. I probably am dying.
I have the left and right problem. I often twitch my writing (right) hand to find out. I also will call my kids by the wrong names.
I didn't learn left and right until sixth grade when someone pointed out I put my right hand over my heart for the pledge. I still sometimes have to put my right hand over my heart to check.
I have a hard time with pairs of things. If I only have weak associations with them, there is a good chance I will be confusing the two of them indefinitely. Two nearby mountain towns are especially difficult for me (Grass Valley and Nevada City) despite being nothing alike.
84: this is a real fluency tell. You go up (suas) but you don't come up, you come anti-down (aníos). Then you either go down (síos) {pause for nudge nudge wink wink} or come anti-up (anuas). So directions all have a point of view. Or something.
Mind you I don't think of "uaim" as meaning away from me particularly. The prepositions don't map that neatly onto English and the same root preposition (ó) is translated as "of" in other contexts (hence Ó surnames). Frequently they change the meaning of the verb entirely (like in English: set up, set down, set to, set off etc).
Ah, yeah, it was glossed as "from" but I guess with the meaning of "from" that's closer to "of" as in of-a-place. Thanks! In general prepositions seem much more important and complex than in English, which is already preposition heavy.
I've always had a terrible short term memory for names, phone numbers, the location of the screwdriver I put in my back pocket, etc. It's better now that I pay more attention to the real world and less to the voices.
Having studied ancient Greek in my misspent youth, nothing about the meaning or impact of prepositions could shock me. In extreme cases a preposition can mean diametrically opposite things depending on the grammatical case of the noun it governs.
Yes, in case I mislead it can mean away from in context also. But actually also in limited circumstances can mean to(wards).
Or see here (appropriately, one of the definitions uses Flann O'Brien as an example)
Www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/ó
Yeah, I know the L trick. But I understand that some people don't have to do the L trick every fucking time and I am not one of those people.
My brother.
Could you try to take a scenario where you presumably are very good at distinguishing left from right--say, which side of the road you drive on, or which hand you write with--and imprint that intuition onto other situations?
This really doesn't work if you have the type of left-right blindness (so to speak) that I (and I suspect Spike) has. The amount of time that you have to take to process this is simply too long for most quick decisions - I have been known to routinely turn the wrong way without even realising it - and if I end up in a street without clear markers I sometimes have absolutely no clue which side of the road I'm supposed to be on. (Part of the reason I have a very hard time with the UK's habit of parking on either side of the road facing whatever direction they want.) I don't really worry about this the way I do other memory lapses, because it's just always how it has been. It'd be cool to know what part of my brain is defective, though!
Pittsburgh allows parking like that. Always unnerving for me.
I know what way to go, internally, but it's that I can't tell what I'm supposed to do if someone tells me to go right or left, or if I'm giving directions I have to think really hard about whether something is to the right or the left. I have zero problems with north-south/east-west.
My main weird word thing is that I'll try to use two words and mash them together (space + place = splace!). I also somewhat frequently just use a word that makes zero sense, completely unrelated to whatever I'm trying to say. Those always weird me out a little.
100: Like the book that told the little girl more than she wanted to know about penguins. I forgot to say that the relevance of Flann is because of the Myles column about the verb "cur".
My main weird word thing is that I'll try to use two words and mash them together (space + place = splace!). I also somewhat frequently just use a word that makes zero sense, completely unrelated to whatever I'm trying to say. Those always weird me out a little.
Jammies does this and I call it a Jamaalapropism.
That's cute. My name does not lend itself malapropism nearly so well.
