The first time I picked up a crayon, I used my left hand. My parents were concerned but waited it out. After watching me use my left hand the next few times they decided to convert me.
I was brought to a special Sunday school service where right is right. They started with drawing, then moved on to writing. Eventually they worked on my instincts, by throwing things at me, at random, to ensure I used the right hand to catch. I was slapped with a yard stick in the knuckles whenever I used the wrong hand.
Leftiism exists. Parents think they are helping but it's caused all sorts of problems in my life.
When I was a kid in the 80s I knew an older man who said when he was a kid his school tied his left arm down behind his back to force him to use his right hand.
Which is strange given that so many world-class renowned inventors and artists are all left handed
I'd be careful trying to deduce something from that (to my knowledge not too studied) factoid. It could (pure speculation) also be, that children growing up with the freedom to use whichever hand they wanted at a time when that wasn't generally the case also had other freedoms like developing their creativity.
If you'd like to know a whole lot more, here's a Wikipedia page that could probably use some editing and reorganization but has over 80 references showing bias against lefties throughout history
A sample,
On March 8, 1971, The Florence Times—Tri-Cities Daily reported that left-handed people "are becoming increasingly accepted and enabled to find their right (or left) place in the world." The Florence Times—Tri-Cities Daily also wrote "we still have a long way to go before the last vestiges of discrimination against left-handedness are uprooted, however." The frequency of left-handed writing in the United States, which was only 2.1 percent in 1932, had risen to over 11 percent by 1972. According to an article by The Washington Post from August 13, 1979, a University of Chicago psychologist, Jerre Levy, said: "In 1939, 2 percent of the population wrote with the left hand. By 1946, it was up to 7 1/2 percent. In 1968, 9 percent. By 1972, 12 percent. It's leveling off, and I expect the real number of left-handers will turn out to be about 14 percent." According to the article by The Washington Post from August 13, 1979, "a University of Michigan study points out that left-handers may not be taking over the world but...7 percent of the men and 6 percent of the women over 40 who were interviewed were lefties, but the percentages jumped to well above 10 percent in the 18-to-39 age group." According to the article by The Washington Post of August 13, 1979, Dr. Bernard McKenna of the National Education Association said: "There was recognition by medical authorities that left-handedness was normal and that tying the hand up in a child often caused stuttering." In Japan, Tokyo psychiatrist Soichi Hakozaki coped with such deep-seated discrimination against left-handed people that he wrote The World of Left-Handers. Hakozaki reported finding situations in which women were afraid their husbands would divorce them for being left-handed. According to the aforementioned article, an official at the Japanese Embassy said that, before the war, there was discrimination against left-handers. "Children were not trained to use their left hand while eating or writing. I used to throw a baseball left-handed, but my grandparents wanted me to throw right-handed. I can throw either way. Today, in some local areas, discrimination may still remain, but on the whole, it seems to be over. There are many left-handers in Japan." In a further article in The Washington Post of December 11, 1988, Richard M. Restak wrote that left-handedness has become more accepted and people have decided to leave southpaws alone and to stop working against left-handedness. In an article by The Gadsden Times from October 3, 1993, the newspaper mentioned a 5-year-old named Daniel, writing: "the advantage that little Daniel does have of going to school in the '90s is that he will be allowed to be left-hander. That wasn't always the case in years past." In a 1998 survey, 24 percent of younger-generation left-handed people reported some attempts to switch their handedness.
The word "sinister" is used to mean something evil and conniving, but it really just means "left," whereas "Dexter" is "right," but dexterous is now used to mean very skillful, agile.
My grandma got her left-handedness beaten out of her by the nuns. Paragons of virtue, the whole lot of them, right up there with Teresa.
I wish this was unbelievable. When/where was this? I'm guessing the US and hopefully a long time ago.
I have seen lefties get in on their hand and I always wonder why they don't turn the paper and write towards themselves. That was the hack I learned from early. It also solves the notebook ring problem.
Yeah but most of the time if you are just writing a fresh page it’s gonna be in that orientation, especially like back in school where it might be for an assignment or something, so more often than not it would be like that
It isn't really because when it gets in your way as a righty you can just switch to the next line and it'll look fine. As a lefty, it's in your way at the very start.
I flip my whole notebook over and use it back to front. Had a friend buy me one made that way for lefties once as a gift, it was actually really nice to have the cover face the right way for once!
I personally think that its not as much as an issue as thicker notebooks creating an uneven writing surface.
Being right handed, your hand is supported at the same level as the writing surface until the very end of a line, where you typically leave more space.
Being left handed, you start every line of writing without your hand being on the same surface as the writing surface, which especially sucks if you have issues with handwriting (which I annecdotedly notice is more common in lefties).
Yeah and arguably each person is equally at fault if they are sitting in a way where they bump elbows
I had a left-handed friend in high-school that just oriented his notebook with the rings on the right (180 degrees rotated).
I love being married to my left-handed wife. We can cook on the same stove together, we can read and hold hands, we can eat without bumping each other so long as we sit correctly. So many things are easier for us because one of us is a lefty.
And who could forget granny's: when you're left handed, "YOU'RE THE LITERAL SPAWN OF SATAN" ok, dear?
Eh, living with themselves was punishment enough. I'm just sorry for the few level-headed outcasts who had to live thinking they were weird or pretending to fit in so they wouldn't be persecuted.
Well the plot twist is, they were generally exceptionally smart at what they needed to know to survive. It's easy to forget how difficult life was for average people up until fairly recently. Like less than a century ago. Education and literacy really weren't a priority.
I’m not sure if not discriminating against lefties, homosexuals, “colored”, women in general, “witches” in particular, muslims, jews, basically anone non-Christian or even non-{insert denomination} counts as “education and literacy”.
It takes education to free people of misconceptions. And to be clear, education isn't just reading, writing, and arithmetic.
I understand there's a trend of blaming older generations for just being worse human beings, but in that case my question is, what changed? Or are people still just as terrible? It's seems undeniable to me that things have improved, and that that improvement comes mostly from better education about issues, and about the world in general.
Since handedness is genetic, there is a chance that that's what she was told when she learned to use the right hand (pun intended)
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39092/how-did-sinister-the-latin-word-for-left-handed-get-its-current-meaning yea, stupid ideas are contagious and latch onto language and culture, apparently. In Italian, left is still "sinistra", so that creates other fun puns like learning to use the sinister hand.
One of my favorite theories, by no means provable, is that since the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and also language (both of those are true actually), it's literally disparaging the side of the body it doesn't control and praising the side it does, which is why so often "left" develops negative connotations and "right" positive ones.
Go hang out with some Koreans (possibly other Asian people too), they will think you must be smart because of being left handed.
I think this meme is a Christian thing, although Muslims do reserve their left hand for the filthier things, so there's that coincidence. But in Asia I don't know any such precedent.
My grandma is left handed, yes she now can write with both hands because they tried to beat it out of her, they did not entirely succeed.
@Gsus4 In my country kids were beaten with rullers on their hands at school until they were able to write right-handed IIRC. Not sure if this brought to them anything else than trauma anyway.
Every time I do something wrong or I'm clumsy my mother blames it on "it's because he's left-handed" been this way for 36 years now.
I agree with all but the last one. From my experience, I'm the only one NOT noticing how anyone writes while I get "oh, you're left-handed" constantly.
But the smudging part reminded me of something that happened to me:
I had a maths teacher who always had one of us do the homework on one of those overhead projector foil things and show them in front of class. I had a geometry task and would always smear the rewritable pen with my palms, or mess the lines up because I had to hold my hand awkwardly high. He did make me do it over and over again because he thought it was sloppy. My mum tried to talk to the teacher and the principal, that I as a lefty kind of faced an uphill battle there, so having me re-do it when I wasn't able to do it the first time was not really going anywhere. The teacher only told her that I needed to learn ways around my left-handedness. So my mum had me do the homework with a permanent marker. No smearing anymore. The teacher even had a smug face on and was all like "See? You can do it after all". That smugness was gone when he tried to clean up the foil. No one said that he had to like the ways I found to deal with such BS.
murican detected. Assuming anyone non-american is a brit, lol. No brit would refer to anyone in a school as a "principal".
I use scissors exclusively with my left hand just to point out to any lefty around that you don't need to buy special scissors.
As a lefty who didn't get my first pair until my 40's, they aren't necessary but boy do they make cutting on a line WAY easier. Crazy differences in difficulty level for a clean cut.
It depends, most scissors now are practically ambidextrous. Some though, have really angled interiors of the handles that make them painful to use for an extended duration.
Using normal, right-handed scissors with the right hand works noticeably better. Cleaner cuts, and you can tell the handle is meant to be held with the right hand. I've used cheap/dull scissors that wouldn't even work with the left hand. Oh man, let me tell you about scissors...
Every time I use right handed scissors I have Soo many issues, the paper usually folds or rips instead of giving me a clean cut, unless I used a certain part of the scissors to cut and no more. To the point that although it was uncomfortable, I used my right hand to cut things with scissors.
When I got older I bout myself a dedicated set of left handed scissors.. fucking amazing, I can make clean cuts with my dominant hand utilising the entire length of the scissors, and it works every time.
And those scissors are now the sharpest scissors in the house because I'm the only one who uses them, the other pairs of right handed scissors in the house are blunt af and barely cut even when I use my right hand.
When you write you accumulate graphite dust or ink onto your hand. Even if you lift your hand between words, the movement of your hand resting on your previous letters makes it happen.
Doesn't that turn the point of that panel null though? I thought that the point was that you get your hand dirty because, when writing from left to right with your left hand, you're more likely to stomp over what you've already written.
Had a friend who got a lot of attention for being ambidextrous.
He wanted to be left alone
Nowhere - everyone hates us because we're too busy fucking with what hand we do sports with
Alternatively, nowhere because you just kinda still end up functionally right handed anyways because everything's built that way and it's easier to just go with the flow even if you can technically use either hand.
I mean, the word ambidextrous means "both right", so by their own definition they're even more right-handed than righties.
Yeah I didn't even really know I was ambidextrous until I was like 15 or 16. I discovered I could write with both hands, and I started doing a bunch of stuff left handed and found out it was pretty easy for me.
Then my dad told me that when I was a little kid I played hockey shooting both ways until I chose shooting left. And he said I always did everything both ways. Just took me until a little later in life to discover on my own.
I can relate to the bottom left image.
My first language is Arabic, which reads from right to left. I am right handed. As such, my hand gets covered in ink.
Handedness doesn't really matter, it's all about how you were taught (or weren't) to do things. For example, my brother is left-handed, but he uses a mouse in the right hand. I'm right handed, but I'm holding the fork in the right hand.
I hold a mouse in my right too. But that's because most mice are designed for right hands.
It's not that simple either though. Yes, I do play the guitar with my right hand and I use computer mice with the right hand. This doesn't change the fact that writing with the right hand is incredibly stressful to my brain and right-handed scissors do not work in my right hand either. Handedness is more like a default setting: You can change the setting to the other hand, but you will have to make an conscious effort to do so every time a new motor skill is learned. I refused to learn computer mice with my left hand because that's just not where mice where in computer rooms and at friend's houses and such. I refused to learn left-handed guitars because then I wouldn't be able to play any other guitar than my own. That's not "doesn't matter" that's "deliberately put in the effort to override the brain".
I'm left handed, and I use a mouse with my right hand since I was 11 (now I'm 35) because my two brothers are right handed.
Huh, was it just me always getting super dirty hands when writing despite being right-handed? I even thought it looked kinda cool with that metallized skin color
No, I did the same. If you press your hand to the paper when writing you're gonna get it smudged regardless of which hand you use.
It is advantageous in ancient combat though. When everyone is carrying a shield with their left hand and their sword on their right hand, the leftie can strike their relatively unprotected opponent's right shoulder, unless the opponent is in formation and has an ally to its right.
Also helpful when storming a tower; spiral staircases are generally spiralled to give a right-handed defender the advantage against a right-handed attacker
But as long as neither you nor your opponent plan to fight in formation, it's all good! This "fighting in formation" thing probably isn't going to catch on.
I'm right-handed but trained myself to use my computer mouse left-handed due to elbow pain. It is so awesome to jot notes w my right hand while mousing with my left.
@Gee2oo40 @sabreW4K3 as just a Basic lefty I agree. Very neat and I don’t have to use a computer a different way than my muscle memory allows
It took me a long long time to get comfortable mousing with my left hand. I usually dock my laptop so that I have a full-sized mouse & KB. But when I use the laptop by itself, I forget how to right-click because of the ambidexterity of it all.
Even though I'm a lefty, I've always moused with my right hand. Mainly because in school, I often wasn't able to move the mouse to the left hand, because they locked the cable to the PC and to the desk in a way that only left you so much cable length, so you couldn't physically move it any more then was required to use it.
Stupid assholes stealing mouses, always gotta ruin it for us lefties.
I'm not left-handed and I constantly point out lefties in movies and tv shows to my partner.
Even tho I am right-handed, I can relate to the top left pic. For some reason, I started eating like a left-handed person when I was little and now it's weird to do it the correct right-handed way, so I won't change it.
In my country the 'correct' way to eat is to hold the knife in your dominant hand and the fork in your off hand. I have always maintained that that's wrong. You keep one utensil close to your plate, and jab the other towards your face. Which one do you want in your most favoured hand?
Yea, here in Germany, the "correct" way is also to use the knife with the dominant hand. Will Never understand this. I use the fork with my dominant hand till I'll die and no one will ever stop me!
Hey lefties, how do you feel about the right-hand-ification of Link from The Legend of Zelda?
don't care in the slightest. Why would I? I write with a different hand than most people, I'm not some kind of suppressed minority in need of media-representation.
I don't care much, but it is too bad that they've made him a bit more of a blank slate. Makes him a little blander.
I'll always have "A Link to the past" in my memory, and some other derivatives from that game.
