“Go north two blocks and then turn west.”

Compass Rose at the NE corner of Powell & O’Farrell Streets, San Francisco, CA http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecastro/354578085/
“He came from the south.”
“The wind is blowing from the east today.”
Last week I wrote a post about the different uses of “up” and “down” in Irish (“Up, Down…In Irish, It’s All Relative!”).
In that post, you learned that how you express these concepts is relative to your position, and depends on whether the thing you’re talking about is moving away from you, toward you, or is in a static position.
You’ll probably not be too surprised, then, to learn that there’s a similar system for the points of the compass: North, South, East, and West.


