A thing that really annoys me about English idiom is that when people name the four cardinal directions, they tend to say "east and west" rather than "west and east" – but they tend to say "left and right" rather than "right and left". And (in the usual north-at-the-top map orientation) those are opposite ways round.

I've always struggled to tell east from west. Whenever I have to translate a spoken direction into something on a map, or vice versa, I always have to stop and think twice to make sure I haven't got them backwards. I have some mnemonics, like "west rhymes with left", or mentally zooming the map out until I can see America and Russia (and I know which of _those_ is "the West"), but they're not instantaneous, and I always have to slow down to check them.

I'm convinced that this reversal in the default speech order is the reason. If my whole life I'd heard "west/east" and "left/right", I would have had no trouble matching up the one that comes first in both forms.

It especially annoys me when _I_ name the directions in those orders. After I've decided it's wrong and bad, you'd think I ought at least to be able to shake the habit myself! But I said 'east, west' again this morning without thinking and kicked myself.