Originally Posted by Ozzie

d. We hear of people coming from "up north" or "down south", but never "left west" or "right east".

Your continuation of the list of English anomalies is great, but at least here in the U.S., some people who think of geography as a flat page have begun to say "left coast" for California, Oregon, and Washington and "right coast" for our eastern seaboard.

10. English history trivia (Great Britain): In very broad strokes, from 1066 to the 1300s, Old English was an underground language spoken by outlaws and subsequently suffered two and a half centuries of change. Chaucer’s Middle English of the 1300s became Shakespeare’s Modern English in the early 1600s.

Only then did Cawdrey’s Dictionary of 1604 attempt to codify the variations of spelling, punctuation and grammar so wide that English speakers from one end of Great Britain could sometimes barely understand the writing of those who supposedly spoke the same language at the other end.

By 1755, Johnson’s English Dictionary had completed the job, and written English of the U.K. was fairly standard. The Oxford English Dictionary of 1884 to present continues the U.K. tradition.