JOHN WELLS posts this nicely confusing sign from Russia. The Russian (and the arrow) tell you to keep to the left, while the English tells you to keep to the right. Prof Wells jokingly speculates that it's intended to make the foreigners awkwardly bump into Russians, maybe to keep them off-balance.

But does anyone else besides me often have to stop and wonder if a difficult English word, or a foreign word, means what it means rather than its opposite?  If you say "horizontal" to me, I have to call "vertical" up to my mind to be sure that horizontal means left-right, not up-down. "Horizontal" in isolation briefly confuses me. Same with "hypo": I'm briefly caught short wondering if someone with "hypoglycemia" has too much or too little of something. I have to recall that "hyper-" is its opposite, and I know what "hyper-" means, allowing me to derive "hypo-"'s correct meaning. I don't mean that I really don't know, but that it takes me a few extra milliseconds to process.

The same is true for some foreign antonym-pairs. The world aldrig in Danish means either "always" or "never". When I hear it, I have to think for a second; ah, yes, altid is its opposite, and that means "always", so aldrig must be "never". (You can see that the al- common to always, altid and aldrig is a bit confusing).  I have this brief little hesitation with many foreign pairs.  And so I suspect that that may have been going on with our Russians here.  Does this happen to anyone else, or do I have a rare, mild but weird variant of dyslexia?