The areas with higher rates of left handedness on the map seem to correlate to the more progressive areas where you’d expect parents and teachers to not discourage it. Was kind of surprised they didn’t mention that, given they started with that anecdote.
Yeah, the side of the political spectrum associated with the color red in the US (which is actually used for the other side in pretty much all of the rest of the world AFAIK) is usually referred to as "right-wing", so they of course think that nothing having to do with left can be good...
To the people downvoting labster's comment: He's making a joke about left-handedness being referred to as "sinister" due to the Latin origins (apparently this may originate from how Romans wore their togas). He's not saying that teachers are making children any less evil.
it shows a few definitions of "sinister" in Latin that seem contradictory. "left", "perverse/bad", but "auspicious" for Romans, while "inauspicious" for Greeks. And a Proto-Indo-European source which is positive.
Yeah, if you think about it, this is a "discrimination" deeply enbedded in pretty much every language - or at least languages with European roots, not sure about others: "right" always has positive connotations (being right, human rights, words like "dexterity" etc.) while "left" has negative ones (not as often, but often enough, like the "sinister" mentioned by the other comment).
Thank you! I was wondering why a one-paragraph story was posted here with the real content in two links you'd have to follow. Your version has some actual content.
I do recall preferring the left hand on my first day with a pencil. However, during that first day, I remember being able to switch to use my right hand as well and it started to feel more comfortable after a very short time. The tipping point was the frustration of using my right hand and failing to be able to control it correctly. I swapped to my (then-worse) left hand and was willing to deal with the frustration better. By the second day, my right hand was too alien and I only switched back briefly in my early 30s due to injuring my left arm/hand, where I basically had pre-school level right-hand cursive.
As far as I know, I'm the only left hander in my extended family.
One of the best available data sets on left-handedness comes from a scratch-and-sniff survey of olfactory ability mailed out to millions of National Geographic subscribers in the 1980s.
Go ahead and read that sentence again — it doesn't get any less weird the second time around.
Why is it that right-handed people play stringed instruments such that the strings are actuated with the right hand (finger picking, flatpicking, strumming, bowing), and fingered with the left? Many left handed players reverse the arrangement.
On the other hand (pun inteneded) left-handed pianos are almost unheard of.
String actuation requires much finer and varied motor skills than simply pressing down on the string. There's many strengths and directions in how a string can be plucked or bowed or strummed and it changes how it sounds, but pressing down on the string is pretty on/off binary.
After the resurgence of homophobia, racism, antivax, misogyny, I've been wondering if we're undoing the last couple of centuries of civilization. I never expected the next step to be left-handedness becoming associated with evil again.
My parents "retrained" me to be right-handed. All primary-school things like writing, using scissors, etc. I do right-handed. For the rest? All I am is confused - some things I do right-handed, others left-handed. FWIW I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid, which...may be related?
I do many things in what is considered the right-handed way, but others the left way. I do a bit or martial arts (badly, but I enjoy it) and there are some things that work better for me the left-handed way there too. For a few things I'm just as good with either hand.
I think I was destined to be ambidextrous (well, ambiUNdextrous!) as I used to write the left side of the page with my left and switch over, and you'd be hard-pressed to spot where the change had happened. If teachers encouraged me to pick a side, the quality of my writing dropped on the other side of the page. I only started to favour the right when my eyes started going “properly funny” (I have a couple of faults there which interact in interesting ways) which meant to be comfortable I tended to turn what I was writing on clockwise (which made writing with the left much less comfortable/practical).
> I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid
Same. And no different as an adult! (even worse now I get recurring vertigo…)
In my case I think it is largely due to my eyes though: my assumption being that because the faults with them changed a lot at the same time I was developing & growing generally, my body/brain were a bit hindered wrt working out the hand-eye coordination and general proprioception businesses.
One interesting note is that mix-handedness is more common than you might think, and it can confer an advantage in some sports and other areas just as full ambidextrousness can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance
Same for me, but in the opposite direction. I had a revelation a few years ago that this is probably why I mix up left and right more than what seems like normal.
Plenty of us righties out there like this. I write, catch, throw, kick etc. as a right hander, but surf, play the drums, jump etc. like a left hander. When I learned to box as a teenager I settled for orthodox, but it could have gone either way. Never had a problem with coordination.
I think it's genetic, and probably a spectrum. My mom's family has a few lefties, and a number of righties that play traditionally left handed positions in team sports.
I too am mixed regarding doing things with different hands - for finer movements (writing, holding a spoon) I prefer using the left hand, while for stronger movements (punching, throwing a ball) I prefer using the right hand. Not sure why though, I never underwent any "retraining".
I'm a leftie and that the same for me. I've think it's because the world is designed for righthanded people so we get retrained even if don't realize it.
The geographical weirdness: left-handedness is much more widespread in Northeast, with some less prominent peaks in Florida, Arizona, South Dakota. The source is suggested to be genetic.
I wonder if there's information on how many passengers of the Mayflower were left-handed.
My son is left handed. Nobody else in my or my wife’s family is or has been left handed, that we know of. And we don’t live in one of the mentioned areas. It seems odd, but I’ve never looked into it.
Some online tests:
* Long form: https://www.brainmapping.org/shared/Edinburgh.php
* Short form: https://www.psytoolkit.org/survey-library/handedness-ehi.htm...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinister#Latin
it shows a few definitions of "sinister" in Latin that seem contradictory. "left", "perverse/bad", but "auspicious" for Romans, while "inauspicious" for Greeks. And a Proto-Indo-European source which is positive.
https://archive.ph/y543P
As far as I know, I'm the only left hander in my extended family.
One of the best available data sets on left-handedness comes from a scratch-and-sniff survey of olfactory ability mailed out to millions of National Geographic subscribers in the 1980s.
Go ahead and read that sentence again — it doesn't get any less weird the second time around.
On the other hand (pun inteneded) left-handed pianos are almost unheard of.
I think I was destined to be ambidextrous (well, ambiUNdextrous!) as I used to write the left side of the page with my left and switch over, and you'd be hard-pressed to spot where the change had happened. If teachers encouraged me to pick a side, the quality of my writing dropped on the other side of the page. I only started to favour the right when my eyes started going “properly funny” (I have a couple of faults there which interact in interesting ways) which meant to be comfortable I tended to turn what I was writing on clockwise (which made writing with the left much less comfortable/practical).
> I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid
Same. And no different as an adult! (even worse now I get recurring vertigo…)
In my case I think it is largely due to my eyes though: my assumption being that because the faults with them changed a lot at the same time I was developing & growing generally, my body/brain were a bit hindered wrt working out the hand-eye coordination and general proprioception businesses.
One interesting note is that mix-handedness is more common than you might think, and it can confer an advantage in some sports and other areas just as full ambidextrousness can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance
I think it's genetic, and probably a spectrum. My mom's family has a few lefties, and a number of righties that play traditionally left handed positions in team sports.
I wonder if there's information on how many passengers of the Mayflower were left-handed.
Probably 0% reported, considering the negative views towards left-handedness at the time.