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Duo claims my The hotel is on the right-hand side "missed a space".
Duo's favoured solution ... on the right side isn't acceptable UK English, whereas ... on the right [not a correct translation here] and ... on the right-hand side [but with hyphen] are OK.
I'm almost sure that "on the right" worked already... anyway, changed "right hand side" to "right-hand side".
Interesting how "correct/right" is "praw", and "right" is "prawej". Not the same in Spanish (correcto -- derecha)
"Correct/right" is rather "prawidłowy/prawdziwy (true)". "Praw" is either a Russian word, or an old-fashioned Polish one that is more like "righteous". "Prawo" is "the Law".
and "prawej" is Locative feminine singular of "prawy" ("right" - as a side)
Why is it that many cultures associate right-ness with correctness? I'm an English native speaker and we have this in English. And recently in my learning Italian, I notice it there too!
a sinistra: to the left (sinistra ~ sinister, inferior to right hand)
a destra: to the right (destro is something like clever, witty, or skillful)
I wondered the same thing. Probably because most people are right handed, so they considered left handed people freaks, cursed or something. Not like people had healthy beliefs in the past... Unrelated: destra is cognate with Serbo-Croatian root desn- which means right.
Interesting points. But on the other hand, you couldn't say "right side" meaning "correct side" unless you had already defined which side was the correct side. Similarly, to say "left side" and mean "abandoned side" would be really rare and, honestly, weird. So, while it may be clearer to say right-HAND-side and left-HAND-side, it is still clear from the context what you are talking about even without the word "hand," because you are talking about "sides."
Interestingly, we here on the American side of the pond like to make puns sometimes about how we drive on the "right side" of the road, meaning both that it is the right-hand-side, and the "correct" side (in our opinion!) as opposed to driving on the left-hand-side, as our friends in the UK and several other countries do. :)
In the context of this sentence, "right-hand side" is more usual than "right side," precisely to avoid the ambiguities jackelliot describes. As far as I know this is true both in North American and in British English.
