isn’t pleasant. Nobody relishes being discriminated against just because they belong to a particular group of people. Nor should anyone be stereotyped because of a particular experience someone has had with one individual of that persuasion.
The truth is I am and always have been ‘corrie-fisted’. For the non Scots speaker (who is in the majority) that means left handed. It comes from the Gaelic word for ‘left’ or ‘wrong handed’. There we go again with negative connotations. It’s time to take ownership of the word and shout it out loud - “Corrie-fisted and proud!”
It’s hard to separate fact from fiction when you research left handedness. Right handed people dominate the world. Around 10% of people in the west are left handed. It is thought to be in our DNA and that we can tell how we are going to turn out by which thumb we suck in the womb. The good news for left handers is that for them the parts of the brain responsible for language skills work better, hence the beautiful flowing prose of this piece of writing. We are also thought to be more creative and have the edge in boxing (south paw). The latter may because we have to learn to cope with orthodox boxers in training whereas they are taken by surprise when faced with a ‘south paw’ in the ring.
Such prestigious names as Leonardo da Vinci, H G Wells, Annie Lennox, Kirsty Wark, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are on the long list of famous left handers. On the other hand, so are Jack the Ripper, Osama Bin Laden, Prince Charles and Bart Simpson.
Society has long tended to associate the left side of something with the bad. We say someone has ‘two left feet’ but that someone else is ‘my right-hand man’. The word ‘sinister’ derives from the Latin for left and brings with it a sense of darkness, evil and threat. Whereas ‘dexter’ or ‘right’ gives us the word ‘dexterous’, or from the French, ‘adroit’ both with the positive meaning of ‘skilful’.
Like many things in life, the choice (if it is a choice at all) is not binary. We should recognise that many people are ambidextrous while others are mixed handed. I have always used my left hand to write but played sports and played the guitar right handed. Today we face the challenges of new technology. I am writing this on my iPad holding it firmly in my left hand and typing out the words with my right. But hold on a moment. Now I am typing with my left and holding it with my right and there’s not a lot of difference. Perhaps how we identify matters less these days.