grump

[gfish]

Who else gets slightly annoyed when people don't use the correct map-relative direction (up->north, down->south, over->east/west) when talking about large-scale geography? From Seattle I can head up to Vancouver, down to Portland, or over to Spokane. Period.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

It drives me nuts in astronomy when I ask a student to point north and they point up!

Or even worse, I get confused by left and right, so when I ask directions I ask for north, south, east and west directions. Some people will simply substitute east for right and west for left, whichever direction you are going.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I blame GPS systems which rotate the map as you drive, ugh. How can you know where you are if the direction of north keeps changing?

Fundamentally, of course, map-reading and innate sense of direction as common skills are going to die out over the next generation. Which I understand, but I just can't not think of the world in terms of my position on a map.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I have great difficulty comprehending verbal directions without a map in front of me.