Question: Why do sailors use the terms "port" and "starboard"? Why not just say "left" and "right" like the rest of us?
Answer: To those of us unfamiliar with nautical terminology, experienced sailors can seem to be speaking a different language, but words like "port" and "starboard" are not modern jargonistic inventions, created for the purpose of confounding landlubbers. "Starboard," for example, can be traced to the Old English word "steorbord," which combines "steor-," meaning "rudder" or "steering oar," and "board," meaning "ship's side." The word refers to the right side of a ship because of an early practice of steering by means of an oar held in the water over the right side.
"Port" came about later (in the 17th century) as a replacement for "larboard," which sounded too similar to "starboard" when called out as a command. (The "lar" of "larboard" is from Old English "lade" and is apparently related to a verb meaning "to load.") The history of "port" is obscure. We don't know for sure if it evolved from the sense of "port" meaning "harbor or harbor town" or from the sense meaning "an opening in a vessel's side (as for admitting light or cargo)," but in either case we can speculate that early vessels with their steering apparatus on the right would have had reason to keep port to the left.
In addition to historical longevity, "port" and "starboard" have the practical advantage of referring clearly to the left or right side of the ship when looking forward, rather than referring to left or right side of the speaker, who could be facing in either direction.
Question: My mother-in-law scoffs at my daily consultation with what she calls the "Delphic" horoscopes in the newspaper. What does she mean by "Delphic"?
Answer: Your mother-in-law has a good vocabulary. The writers of daily horoscopes who supply their readers with such helpful advice as "Seek counsel but make your own decision" and such prophetic announcements as "New lines of communication open" are in fact following an ancient oracular tradition. It's not unreasonable to characterize their deliberately vague pronouncements as "Delphic," a word that is part of our cultural legacy from Greece. The word perpetuates the name of the ancient Greek town of Delphoi (better known now in its Latin form "Delphi").
Delphi was situated on the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece and was the site of classical Greece's most important temple. The temple was believed to occupy the center of the world. Originally an oracle of the goddess Gaea, Delphi by the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. had acquired fame throughout the Greek world as the foremost oracle of Apollo. The oracular medium or priestess, known as Pythia, was a mature woman who lived apart from her husband and dressed in the clothes of a maiden.
Following an elaborate ritual, the Pythia and the visiting suppliant would first bathe in a spring, and then the priestess alone would drink from a sacred spring before entering the temple. Then, seated on a sacred tripod positioned over a fissure in the rocks (from which vapors emanated), she would chew the leaves of the laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo. While in her divine ecstasy she would utter incoherent responses to the questions the suppliant had previously posed. Her utterances were interpreted by attending priests, who then proceeded to recast the messages into verses that were often highly ambiguous or obscure.
The Delphic oracle became proverbial for the nature of its forecasts even in its own time. The word "Delphic" ultimately became a synonym for "ambiguous" and "obscure," which is presumably what your mother-in-law has in mind when it comes to horoscopes.