Is this a joke?

[Iscah]

This is just another Koji-ism like larboard and other such things that make no sense if you think about them lol. He tries to be fun and clever but sometimes it is just a bit out there instead lol.

There was a perfectly valid reason for "larboard" and he talked about it at one of the Fanfests. It was an awkward thing to translate, since the original Japanese uses the equivalents of 'port' and 'starboard', but are literally more like 'leftboard' and 'rightboard' - so easy for a player to instantly understand which way they needed to go. The English terms were going to be more cryptic, so he tried to think of a way around it that could have the same instant association, remembered there was an older word for 'port', and settled on it as the best choice for exactly the same thing the fandom worked out as a reminder: Larboard = Left.

(And still it caused all that commotion and they had a meeting about it, and the Japanese writers are going to communicate with the English writers from now on before settling on the names for instant-reaction mechanics.)