I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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Walking backward is just walking negatively forward by another name
Just guessing here, but I would think it's for for clarity and brevity. West and South are shorter to say and distinct enough to avoid being easily misheard causing somebody to go in the opposite direction than intended.
Left and Minusleft
Exactly, we don't need to be right at all.
Clockwise and anticounterclockwise
Double plus ungood
I dunno. That seems double plus ungood to me.
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Why do we have 2 separate words for good and bad? Good and ungood are totally sufficient.
Spin it further and get rid of "great" and "outstanding". I suggest using plus good and double plus good.
That's actually how it works in Irish. The word for good is deas, while the word for bad is deas prefixed with the negating particle mí, so mídheas.
(There are still separate words for tge cardinal directions).
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Why stop at two, when you could stop at just one?
North
Negative North = south
Negative 90 North = west
90 North =east
Better idea! What if we use 0 for North and then divide the circle around by exactly 360 points? That way we don't need NSEW, we have 0, 90, 180, 270!
Ah... I love airplanes... To be clear, the issue with this is that magnetic 0 is not the same as true 0. There's a slight offset that can cause issues. So why not have like... True 0 and magnetic 0. T0 and m0?
Why not?
Because what happens when your referent changes? Which direction is Mars from Earth? We obviously need a single navigational system that works anywhere in the universe.
Easy! Assuming the earth is the center of the universe, coordinates are 360,360
+- the current position of the Earth in the solar system +- the current position of the solar system in the Milky Way. In the Local Cluster, in the Local Group, in the Virgo Supercluster, in the Local Mesh
In order to return, we just go that way:
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We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:
1 N = North
i N = West
i^2^ N = South
i^3^ N = East.
And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance or speed... or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.
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Why stop at one when you could stop at just zero and not use a compass?
This reply was brought to you by The Lost MC.
In emergencies when you need to use a compass you can save time by using these maximally efficient cardinal names: , , , and .
Yes! Now we are getting somewhere.
Why do we have 26 letters? Why not just communicate in binary!
01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100001
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Negative north negative east airlines doesn't have a good ring to it though.
How about 225° airlines?
And I say we don't have enough names, we should have names for at least 30° and 45° increments.
We do, they’re just combinations of the 90 degree ones.
Southwest. North-Northeast.
Yeah, there are 32 named points on a compass, one every 11.25 degrees, you can even fractionalize it to get even more granular
Southwest by west half west for example is 242 degrees
Most Mediterranean cultures used to have names for at least eight winds, each at 45 degrees from each other. Greeks (and therefore Romans) used twelve, at 30 degrees.
Here's a classic navigator's wind rose, for instance, with 32 different directions based on eight named winds (might be a bit hard to read on dark backgrounds, here's the original SVG):
What goes up, must come negative-Up
One step forward and two steps un-forward.
"negative Eastern countries" has a nice ring to it.
Better question is why don’t they have 8? I hate saying “north by north east”.
You gotta say "nor-nor-east" instead, that's a blast.
Northeast would be one of the 8 already. North by northeast is the direction between north and northeast
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How would that be any easier?
If the four cardinal points bother you, better not look up wind roses or rhumbline networks...
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This is basic coordinate usage. Negative latitudes are South. And 180 or -180 is half a planet away from the prime meridien. West of England are negative longitudes.
In addition to what others have already said, it'd be really silly to make one a negative of the other in the most basic sense, too.
There have been so many issues with electrons having a "negative" charge, and that's a binary situation! It would be so much worse to introduce implied favoritism with basic directions.
This is just the Minecraft coordinates system and it sucks. "OK I'm at the coords, where's the--oh fuck, it was -3002, 108 not 3002, 108."
I would not be surprised compasses were invented before negative numbers
Do we really need West and South when we can use negative North and negative East?
Yes of course.
Otherwise I couldn't say anymore: "I am looking North and my butt is looking South".
And how would you even pronounce south-Southwest then? Impossible unless you are quite drunk!
/s
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North and south are fundementally different, climate and biosphere -wise, so i don't think it would ever make sense to people to modify the same word to describe two very different things. East and west maybe less so, but dawn and dusk are pretty important differences.
Some polynesian cultures use two main direction words, which usually translate as something like mountain-ward and beach-ward.
Other languages kinda do. In Spanish, east and west are este and oeste. Italian is est and ovest.
As a practical matter, relative directions are already hard enough, where I might say that Colorado is east of California, and California is west of Colorado.
To use +/- East would mean there's now just a single symbol difference between relative directions. California bring -East of Folorado, and Colorado being +East of California.
Also, we need not forget that the conventional meridian used for Earth navigation is centered on Greenwich in the UK, and is a holdover from the colonial era where Europe is put front-and-center on a map and everything else is "free real estate". Perhaps if the New World didn't exist, we would have right-ascension based system where Greenwich is still 0-deg East and Asia is almost 160-deg East. Why would colonialists center the maps on anywhere but themselves?
Why even use WORDS for it? That's too long.
Let's use ternary numbers, one for each of North-South and East-West. A 1 is center, 2 is north/east, and 0 is south/west.
So North is now 21. South east is 02.
Much easier to say like that, and it covers all 8 directions too and the center (11) too.
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