“Got out of the wrong side of the bed?”

Everyone will have been accused of this feat at some point in their lives when they are having a particularly grumpy day.   But which is the wrong side of the bed?  How can I tell, when I don’t even know which is the right side of the bed?  Or the left side.

I believe that I typically sleep on the right side of the bed.  I make this assessment by facing the bed whilst standing at the foot of it.  However, I am aware that there is an entirely different sector of society who will claim that I actually sleep on the left side of the bed.  These are what I class as the Prone Measurers.  For them, the side of the bed on which you sleep is measured from a position of lying face-up, head on their pillow at the head of the bed.

Who is correct?  There is no official standard for measuring which side of a bed is right and which is left.  A survey of a cross-section of the sleeping public finds a roughly 50/50 division of opinion.

When it comes to the human body, the Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘left’ as being ‘the side of your body that is to the west when you are facing north’.  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s equivalent definition is ‘being the side of the body in which the heart is mostly located’.  I feel that neither definition is of great help when it comes to beds, although the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition might seem to favour my method of measuring bed-sidiness, assuming that the head of the bed is always considered ‘north’ regardless of what direction it is actually facing.

Social constructionism: it is confusing.  Particularly in the instances when society does not have a consensus on its construction.  It is enough to make you so grumpy that you’ll be accused of having got out of the wrong side of the bed.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree finds himself in a spin thinking about right or left.