We got sucked into a rabbit hole this week about why ships still say port and starboard instead of left and right. It sounds like nautical showing-off. It's actually a fix for a very old problem that boats had a thousand years ago.
Long before ships had a proper rudder mounted on the back, Viking and Anglo-Saxon boats were steered with a big oar hung off the right-hand side of the stern. The Old English word for that oar was stēor (steer), and the plank it hung on was a bord. Smash them together and you get steorbord, which we now spell starboard. Most steersmen were right-handed, so putting the oar on the right just made sense, and everybody copied everybody else until it became the standard. So starboard doesn't mean right in some abstract way. It means the side the steering thing is on, and that side happens to be on your right when you're facing the bow.
Here's where it gets fun. Because the steering oar was on the right, you obviously couldn't dock the ship on that side. You'd snap the oar in half. So ships pulled up to the wharf on the left side, and the English called that side larboard, from ladeboard (the loading side). Great word. Terrible idea. Larboard and starboard sound almost identical, especially yelled across a windy deck by someone with a mouthful of salt water. Ships kept turning the wrong direction. The Royal Navy officially banned larboard in 1844 and told everyone to say port instead, since that was the side you actually put against the port. The US Navy followed shortly after. One vowel change probably saved a lot of hulls.
The obvious question is why any of this survives in an era of GPS, bow thrusters, and container ships the size of small towns. The answer is that port and starboard are absolute, not relative. Left and right depend on which way you're facing. If the captain says "hard left" and you're looking aft, you'll spin the wheel exactly the wrong way. Port is always the same side of the boat no matter which direction anyone is facing, whether they're on the bridge, down in the engine room, or hanging off the side painting something. Aviation borrowed the same logic, which is why the red and green navigation lights on planes match the ones on ships. Red on port, green on starboard. A pilot at night can tell instantly which way another aircraft is pointed.
If you've got a favorite weird-etymology story we should chase down for a future Friday, send it our way. We'll happily lose another afternoon to it.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
