Port and Starboard, or Left and Right

I once saw the mnemonic “The ship LEFT the PORT” and never again forgot which was port and which was starboard.
For red/green, the political angle works great :-)

Just fyi – public schools in Germany is the equivalent of local schools in the UK ;-)
We do have “public schools” in the UK meaning as well.
Latin is taught either optionally (vs Greek or vs French) or, depending on the school, is even compulsory.

Latin : “Might be true in the UK”.
In 1960, Scottish state schools had Latin compulsory for those most likely to go to university. It disappeared after 1970.

Inkognito wrote:

there is a lot of overlap in the nautical terms

Thank god it is not Americanized as aviation, or all the nautical terms would be cryptic acronyms

There is an easier mnemonic with a real life application, too: Just imagine a traffic light – “red means stop, green means go”. If you are crossing ways with another plane at night and if you see a red light, it means he has the right of way. Because, of course, you must see his left wing then and thus he is coming from the right.

PS: As far as I understand, the rudder could be damaged thus the ships put the port side to the quay wall. I’ve been told that is the reason a harbour is called port. Wiktionary supports this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/port#Etymology_1
PPS: (deepl says it’s ‘kaimauer’ in english, but that’s just the german word for it – on the other hand, there is a lot of overlap in the nautical terms)

Peter wrote:

Latin shows that your parents could afford 5k-20k a year for private schooling

Might be true in the UK – in most other parts of Europe it’s not. In German public high schools – we have very few non public in the first place – Latin is also “umsonst”… (hard to translate to English as depending on context “umsonst” can mean “for free” as well as “pointless”).

Peter wrote:

Well, he was a communist

Chomsky was/is a communist? Well, I guess, if you use the term as a slur to slap on anyone to the left.

That reminds me of this cartoon which was published in a Swedish magazine in the early 1970’s, I believe, and still resurfaces from time to time:

Man: “But please, officer, I’m an anti-communist.”
Police officer: “I don’t f-cking care what kind of communist you are. I’ll kill you, you bastard!”

Latin was mandatory at my State school from 11years old.

You know the old saying: if you are 20 and not a communist, you haven’t got a heart. If you are 40 and are a communist, you haven’t got a brain. He’s 93