Boxing The Compass

Day 135: Quite a few of my friends admit to being (as they put it themselves) "directionally challenged," a concept which both baffles me and causes me great consternation. Should I ask for instructions to get to their library, for example, they'll tell me to "turn left" off the main drag without asking which way I'll be heading. "Left" depends on the direction of travel in order to be interpreted correctly. If I'm travelling eastbound, "left" will take me north; if westbound, a left turn would route me south. Kinda makes it hard to find the destination, y'know?

Now I don't expect miracles here, but if you know the cardinal points of a compass (North, South, East and West), you should be able to figure out where NE, SE, SW and NW are. Being able to recite them in order clockwise/anticlockwise is called "boxing the compass," and mariners were once required to be able to recite not just the eight points I've listed, but the full 32 (in some cases, 128!) "winds": cardinal, intercardinal/ordinal, half-winds and quarter winds. Examples: NNE is a half-wind, halfway between N and NE, NbE ("North by East") is a quarter-wind E of N. I've 'shopped a 32-point windrose into the compass mirror for illustrative purposes. While you won't need to commit them all to memory for basic land navigation, your well-oriented friends will appreciate directions which cannot be misinterpreted to mean the opposite of what you intended.