For my entire life I’ve been part of a small, mostly silent minority, jeered at, discriminated against…and all because I’m left-handed. Now, being left-handed isn’t something I chose. No, it’s something in the DNA like being blond, or blue-eyed, and it happens to 10% of the population. Paleontologists tell us that percentage has remained constant over the past 500,000 years that man has been walking erect. No one knows why this happens. One unscientific conjecture is that it’s due to the random way the fetus lies in the womb.
In school, teachers ‘rapped’ your knuckles… “learn to write right-handed. Don’t you want to be like the other children,” they insisted. Desks were comfortable for those who could rest their right arms but us lefties were forced to twist our bodies whenever we needed to write. And don’t get me started on our resulting stained hand when we wrote with ink or ball-point pens…stains difficult to rub off.
I’m aware that there is an increasingly scarce minority of you who even remember ‘ink’ and ‘inkwells.’ They no longer exist. Today they are part of a senior’s nostalgic past.
In past centuries those who were left-handed were treated with suspicion. In France, the word for left is ‘gauche, meaning clumsy or gawky. Or the word ‘sinister,’ translated as sinister.
But today we have learned that the right, analytical, creative, verbal side of the brain controls the left side of the body. Ergo, only left-handed people are in their right mind. Mythical or true? You decide!
More recently scientists with too much time on their hands have tried to understand why left-handedness has prevailed at a constant percentage through the centuries. The conclusion they reached is that it was due to both ‘competition’ and ‘cooperation.’
In ancient combat, it’s theorized, the right-handed warrior would be less familiar with facing a left-handed opponent. This would give the lefty a distinct advantage. Attacks from an unexpected direction certainly meant a higher survival rate. And higher survival numbers would increase our 10% figure.
But as societies developed cooperation was required to live together. Products were developed for the majority right-handed population, thus balancing the scales, taking us back to 10%.
Lefties continue to find difficulty in using scissors, ladles, or playing a guitar. Left-handed violins and music for left-handed musicians are a rarity. And imagine the nearly one million left-handed soldiers in World War II trying to learn how to shoot a rifle loaded from the right side.
Yet, with it all, we count among ourselves Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Leonardo da Vinci, Babe Ruth, and best of all: Ned Flanders, Homer Simpson’s neighbor who owns Springfield’s only left-handed specialty store, known as the Leftorium.
So, if you’re left-handed, don’t despair, you’re in good company.