Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey

I dropped the ball last month. No blog entries. Unfortunate, too, because I had a clever one brewing for April 15th, tax day. Had something to do with plucking a goose. It'll have to wait for next year.

Last month my dog Annie got sick and passed away, and my wife and I moved to a new house in Omak, Washington. Lots of big changes going on. That's what's kept me from the keyboard.

Today I've been thinking about directions. It started with a conversation with my wife over my childhood confusion about the saying, "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey." I guess I never understood why turning a faucet clockwise meant turning it to the right. It seemed to me that it depends on where on the faucet is your frame of reference.

If you pick any point on the top half of the faucet and you turn clockwise, that point indeed moves toward the right. But if you pick any point on the lower half of the faucet and you turn clockwise, then that point moves to the left. Whether the faucet turns right or left depends entirely on your frame of reference. Because we tend to orient to the top and left (as when we read...left to right, top to bottom), "righty-tighty" tends to work as a mnemonic for remembering how to turn off a faucet. But really, that faucet is turning left as much as it is turning right.

Want more complication? Left-right is only one axis: add another axis (call it up/down, even though technically it may not be moving "up"), and you can invent your own mnemonic: "uppy-tighty, downy-loosey." Or would it be the other way around?

Another example: I've learned that tornadoes north of the equator turn counterclockwise most of the time. (The tendency is due in part to the Coriolis effect.) I ask: counterclockwise to whom? If I'm a pilot in an airplane far overhead the tornado...would I see it turning counterclockwise? If so, then if my twin were on the ground, in the proverbial "eye of the storm," looking upward--he would see it turning clockwise.

Now...if my twin on the ground looked up to see this clockwise movement, and then was swept up into the tornado...and the wind lifted him to the middle of the thing (that is, mid-way between the sky and the earth)...what direction would he be travelling--clockwise or counterclockwise? Does it depend on whether he's looking up or looking down? What if he's looking sideways?

A final note: I discovered the word widdershins when I Googled tornado direction. It means going in the direction that's opposite from what's generally accepted.