Posted on 09/28/2024 11:09:20 AM PDT by DallasBiff
Lefties historically have had a tendency to get left behind. Until relatively recently, being left-handed was stigmatized, sometimes as an abnormality or sign of weakness. Left-handed children were forced to learn to write with their right hands, often to their significant disadvantage.
Of course, we now know that there’s nothing wrong with being left-handed. As University of Toledo psychologist Stephen Christman recently explained in Scientific American, there’s almost no evidence to suggest that lefties are at any sort of physical or psychological disadvantage. For one thing, lefties have comprised roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the general population for many thousands of years. The fact that the trait has remained stable over many generations suggests that left-handedness is not an evolutionary weakness, as many psychologists of the past believed.
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When someone comments on my left handedness I say “73% of geniuses are left handed.” When I get a skeptical look or comment I respond with “But then so are 83% of serial killers.”
ISWYDT.
CC
My parents had 9 children — first two were twins — 4 boys and 5 girls. Three of us girls are right-handed, the other two girls are ambidextrous and can each write well with either hand. The 4 boys were all left-handed. My father (b. 1911) claimed that he was born right-handed but was forced in school to learn to write with his left hand.
I had 4 sons, and one is left-handed.
I’m a true anomaly and proud of it.
I can write legibly with either hand (including upside down and backwards in print or script).
I throw and catch with my right hand, but hold my fork and style my hair with my left. In gymnastics, I favored my left side; in dance, my right.
Bowed my violin with my right but strummed guitar with the left.
I ranked in the 98% for engineering but went into teaching, then engineering, then property/risk management.
Born a woman, every test I’ve taken indicates an 80% or higher male dominated brain/thought patterns.
My father and two of my children are left handed.
I realized that different sides of my brain were being activated for different skills and just went with what felt natural.
:)
I remember reading in a book years ago written by George Will titled either “Bunts” or “Men at Work” about a pitching coach named Ray, I can’t remember his last name, for the Milwaukee Brewers who said something to the effect that “left-handed people can’t run in a straight line. He thought it was “the gravitational pull on the earth’s axis that got’em” So he would have his left-hand pitchers run sprints along the right field foul line because if he had them run sprints along the left field foul line “they would whip your whole line out of shape”. My mother was left-handed and so is one of sons and my daughter. I threw right but batted left.
I don’t know about screeching. But it was pretty screwed up for a long time. It was only post WWII that Catholic schools stopped trying to beat the left-handedness out of kids. Like the articles says, shrinks thought it was a weakness for a long time. Then of course there’s the language, Latin for left-handed is “sinister” as opposed to “dexter”, and look what we did with those Latin roots. I mean things are better now, but there’s nothing wrong with remembering how it was, because that’s how we keep the pendulum from swinging back, humanity loves to hate the other. And left-handed people were the first other most societies had to kick around.
My mother was one of those Catholics. She ended up being able to perform any task with either her right or her left hand equally well.
What if you are right handed, and your dominant eye, is your left eye?
18 % of us were born that way.
Left handed people are inclined to be accident prone, in part because everything is designed for right handed people.
When my left-handed daughter turned 5, we had a birthday party, and there were 9 children there, all about that age. Only 2 of them were right-handed. ? I thought it was interesting that her little friends might be majority lefties.
And then there are the ambidextrous athletes.
Remember this Switch Hitter vs. Switch Pitcher:
https://youtu.be/yDyCRTlKllk?t=77
Toddlers used to be forced to use the right hand. Wonder what the impact is?
My grandmother was one. She ended up thinking society was screwed up and vowing to never mess with her kids that way. Which let my mom be left-handed, and then me. Give that it’s totally genetic and nothing the kid can decide (sure you can train your off hand up, but that doesn’t change how you’re wired) it was a pretty screwed up mentality, one might even call it sinister.
Not really. I’m way less accident prone than my right-handed wife. And oddly enough not everything actually is designed for right-handed people. Cars, at least outside England, are significantly better for left-handed people. I have my good hand to reach out the window for ATMs and drive-thrus, I drive a stick and that means my good hand is on the wheel while I shift.
I’m married to a Southpaw, but he recently had his left arm below the elbow severely mauled by a dog while trying to break up a dog fight. He has been trying to adjust to using his right hand to write or eat. Also my grandson and my uncle are/were southpaws? Also Paul McCartney, of whom I’m a big fan.
Quite a list of US presidents were left handed.
Lefties were crammed into righty school desks, leaving an opening for a class action suit.
Being left handed is good.
I’m a left handed person who could never read a note of music.
I had a jury to my right hand as a child and started to use my left hand. All through school I was left handed. I went to Catholic school and the nuns never discouraged it.
The older I got the more I started to use my right hand again. I can write legibly with both hands and use my right hand for some things and the left for others.
My son is the same. He had an eye injury as a toddler and wore a patch for quite awhile. I think that had something to do with him being ambidextrous.
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