Are left-handers sinister?

By Ande Jacobson

Historically, left-handedness was considered sinister, stemming from the Latin for left. Its counterpart is dexter meaning right. The term sinister took on its nefarious character fairly early on though.

From a population perspective, about 10-12% of the human population is naturally left-handed, though some cultures strongly either discourage left-handedness, or outright forbid it. In the U.S. it was common to “convert” left-handers to using their right hand instead through the first half of the 20th Century. That slowly started changing in the 1960s and 70s, but educational theory at that time still focused on ensuring that children had a dominant side. Even that has fallen out of favor today. After all, being ambidextrous can be a great advantage at times.

My mother grew up in the earlier era when schools still tried to convert everyone to being right-handed. Unfortunately, she was so dominantly left-sided that she really couldn’t switch at that time, so her father fought with the school to stop the teachers from trying to convert her. She told me of vigorous arguments between her father and her maternal grandfather growing up. Her father was of the opinion that a person should use their dominant side as they preferred and should never be converted away from it. Her grandfather had escaped the pogroms of Czarist Russia, and he saw her being left-handed as something evil. He tried hard to get my mother to stop using her left hand as though her life depended on it. He told her that if she didn’t, when she grew up people would call her a lefty as though that were some kind of horrible curse. This hadn’t made sense to my mother when she was a child.

As I mentioned in an earlier essay, I’m somewhat ambidextrous, but I favor my left hand over my right when strength or dexterity are required. When I was very young, I tried hard to be like my father who was right-handed. Sadly, he died when was just shy of 11, so I started emulating my mother after that. My maternal grandfather also tested me a few years later and determined that I was much stronger with my left hand. In fact, when I switched from bowling right-handed to bowling left-handed, my average jumped by over 50 pins. The same thing happened with other activities, so my grandfather was right. I should have been using my left hand straight along.

Many years later when I was a senior in high school, I was in a program at NASA called the NASA Ames Research Center’s Student Space Biology Program. Each school involved in the program could send two students to work with NASA scientists in their labs and attend weekly lectures from various NASA staff scientists on their research. The scientist I was paired with and I got into a strange one-upsmanship contest one day. We had already determined that we could both write backwards, a somewhat unique but not unheard of skill. We then proceeded to up the ante:

Scientist: I can write with both hands.

Me: I can write with both hands simultaneously.

Scientist: I can write my first name with one hand and my last with my other simultaneously.

Me: You win!

Like me, the scientist was somewhat ambidextrous, but she favored her left hand over her right for most things. She told me of her involvement in a joint program with the then Soviet Union called the U.S.-USSR Kosmos Project. This was during the Carter administration. Every year they held a conference that alternated between the U.S. and the USSR. One recent year, they had polled the two scientific delegations and determined that the U.S. delegation was about 34% left-handed, significantly higher than the general population average of closer to 10-12%. The Soviets had zero left-handers in their delegation, far below the general average. The U.S. were told that in Soviet culture at that time, left-handedness wasn’t allowed. When I got home that night and related the story to my mother, she said that the arguments between her father and grandfather finally made sense. She knew that her grandfather loved her very much. His adamancy about her needing to do everything she could to not be left-handed had seemed odd to her, but she finally understood why he felt so strongly about that.

With respect to left-handedness though, I’ve always thought that left-handers were inherently smarter than a comparable right-handed person for the simple reason that left-handers use a larger percentage of their brain. The scientist I worked for at NASA agreed and in fact had a hand in my better refining my reasoning on this. If intelligence is predicated on how much of one’s brain is active, then left-handers would have an advantage because of the simple reality that they have to constantly convert things when learning new skills. They are often taught how to do something right-handed, but they then have to figure out how to reverse whatever it is they are doing to do it left-handed. That takes a certain amount of puzzle solving that a similarly engaged right-hander wouldn’t need to do.

It’s a challenge for left-handers living in a right-handed world, but is it dangerous? That question has long been argued with no definitive answer. The fact is that the vast majority of people are right-handed, so in general, most things are designed for the majority of the population. Whether its appliances and tools, or even leisure facilities, there’s often an unexpected sidedness to things we encounter. Take golf courses as an example. The layouts of each hole are designed to greatly favor a right-handed player. There are a few notable exceptions though.

As an undergraduate, I bowled on the school’s intercollegiate bowling team. Along the way, I worked in the campus bowling alley, and as part of that job I eventually learned how to fit and drill bowling balls. I also learned a great deal about the physics of bowling and about lane maintenance. This was back in the 1980s, so some things may have changed a bit over the years, but at that time we paid particular attention to how the lanes were dressed – i.e., how and how often they were cleaned and oiled. Yes, there was oil on the lanes to protect the wood, and the lane wear and pattern of the oil was something a competitive bowler needed to study. Because there were far more right-handed bowlers, the right side of the lane wore faster, and the oil also broke down faster. That meant that at least for the strike ball, a left-handed bowler would often have a cleaner lane to work with. That difference in wear was also something that needed to be considered for spare shots – particularly cross-lane shots to catch corner pins. In all of this, a left-handed bowler had a slight advantage overall.

In other activities, being left-handed is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, but it is noticed. When I would music direct a pit orchestra, those who had worked with me before knew that I was left-handed, and that I held the baton in my left hand. Conducting uses both hands, but the “accepted” norm is to hold the baton in the right hand (the more common dominant hand), and cue with the left hand. That is how conducting is taught, and for some that convention is taken as gospel, but there’s really no reason for that kind of rigidity. I do it the other way around holding the stick in my left hand, and I’ve worked with at least two other music directors who do likewise. The fascinating aspect of this was what one fellow player and music director noted the first time he played in one of my orchestras. He said that he noticed I was conducting left-handed for about the first five minutes or so, and after that, he really didn’t notice anything being different from what was expected.

So the upshot is that in the general population, being left-handed is still considered a novelty just because of the numbers. It’s sometimes erroneously looked upon as something sinister (in a nefarious way). And it’s completely natural for those so gifted.

References:
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/handedness/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2446422/
https://www.dictionary.com/e/sinister-dexter-left-right-word-origin-history/
https://agoodreedreview.com/2022/02/18/finding-the-limits-of-the-rules/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/53739189
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/201908/8-new-scientific-findings-about-left-handedness