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It’s lefthanders’ day!

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Anyone else on the sinister side with me and Jimi?

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  2. Me too Chiz.
    The days of fountain pens at school were a shocker. Chequered books a pain in the arse.
    For golf and cricket I adopt the right hand position. A golfing mate said I’d never be any good.

  4. Yes and no. I write left-handed (having been liberated from Miss Murphy’s clutches by my furious mother), throw and bowl left-handed, clean my teeth left-handed. Kicking a football, batting, playing tennis and guitar – all right-handed or -footed. I’m pretty much ambidextrous with tools (oo-er missus etc). Use a mouse with both hands too, depending on how the RSI is going.

    I mentioned this last time the subject came up: I shared a flat with 4 women, and all 5 of us were lefties. What are the odds?

  6. I was initially going to put that no, I’m just cack handed…… But then something in the deep dark recesses of my brain triggered that I recall someone telling me that cack handed originally did mean left handed. ? I suppose I could check on Google.

    • From the Oxford Dictionary

      1Inept; clumsy: a great song ruined by cack-handed production
      2 derogatory Left-handed.

      Origin
      Mid 19th century: from cack, in the sense ‘excrement’, + hand + -ed2.

      • This is because you’d use your non dominant hand to wipe your backside with – which for nearly everybody was their left.
        The left hand was seen as unclean (as Junior found with using it to eat) and ungodly – hence sinister.
        Don’t forget that 100 years ago, children were forced to use their right hand, left hand tied to stop them using it – this was meant to have caused George vi’s stutter.

        • The persecution of lefties went on a lot later than that. Kids were still being punished and humiliated for doing what came naturally well into the 1960s. 1970s – I wasn’t allowed to sit by the window in the classroom because my elbow might jog the righty’s next to me; 1980’s, I was 17, batting against some serious quicks, before I even saw a left-handed batting glove; at practice, the coach would stand at the end of the right-handed bowlers’ run up, while I’d stand alone at mine, ten yards away… at college, those discriminatory lecture theatre chairs… as a young teacher, smudging everything I wrote on the white board or contorting like a gymnast to avoid it… man, my people have suffered.

  7. (mentioned this last time) I’m extremely left handed. The only thing I regularly use right handed are scissors, cutting with right & guiding with left. I think this is down to late 60s infant school having a tin box full of blunt scissors & the teacher insisting I went with what the other pupils were doing – all righties.
    I was talking about this to my sisters a few weeks ago & trying to remember what my left handed father did, but was reminded how he’d get frustrated & pass most things to the right handed members of the family.

  8. Given the way that attitudes have changed towards language that discriminates against minorities, maybe it’s time we banned terms like Dexterous and Sinister. 10% of the population are left behind by these rightist slurs. This is not right. We must fight (southpaw, obviously) for the rights of Lefties! I mean the lefts of Lefties! You have nothing to lose but your badly-trimmed fingernails and ink-stained hands!

            • I should have added above that is as advised by my tailor.

              As regards some of my best friends? Having read some of the responses on here I daren’t look, let alone ask.

              • Out of interest, how does the tailor determine the, er, direction of dangle? Do they use some kind of instrument, or just stare at your groin for a bit?

                • I believe they shove their bevinlayed engloved hands down yer treeks, grab and suspend ones lower appendage(s) causing the upper appendage to fall into an area of space to either the right or left.

                  These actions are accompanied by considered and knowing harrumphs and affirmative grunts. On rare occasions, where doubt exists, you may hear, in appropriate and subdued tones (barely a whisper actually) ‘up a little, down a little’. And that’s it. Throughout this entire process there is no eye contact between tailor and customer.

                  One is then ushered into a consultation room where ones dexterity is confirmed.

                  Do you really not know this kind of thing?

  9. Left handed, but play drums and guitar right handed, probably because I learned by picking up other people’s gear, and none of my musical friends were lefties. Same with golf, a game I hate, but the few times I played it as a kid it was with my dad’s righty clubs.

  10. There’s absolutely no stigma attached to being left handed. None at all. Left-handed person quite as good as a right-handed person in every way.

    Except writing. Unless you live in a country where the writing goes from right to left, you have to sort of curl your hand over the top of the line so you can a) see what you’re doing, and b) not smear it all to hell.. That looks pretty funny, actually. Lefties hooking their claw over like that so they can “write backwards”. Quite understand kids getting taunted unmercifully for that. And the occasional thrashing. Get thrashed often enough and maybe they’ll end up writing like normal people.

  13. As left handed as you like.

    Play guitar left hand but can’t get on with left handed guitars. They look remarkably odd to me. I have a righty Strat I invert a la Jimi. I love it and it looks cool. Whereas inverted Les Pauls simply do not.

    I was often asked as a kid how I coped with scissors etc as a lefty. Very well as it happened. I’ve never found using such things with my left hand any bother, because I’d never use them with my right in the first place. My left handed way was the only way I knew.

    Same with handwriting. I used fountain pens at school and still do now. A brief few weeks of smudged handwriting until I adapted a way round it. No problem.

  16. Left-handed, as well. Though I play guitar the normal way, which may have affected how I feel about my two hands – the left is more regimented, ordered, while the right is more ‘artistic’.

    That thing about numbing your hand before self-pleasuring – it’s the right hand that takes the lead there as well, for similar reasons.

    What’s that you say? TMI?

  18. I always thought Macca being a lefty meant the Beatles had a very nice symmetry when Lennon sang and George and Paul sang BVs into one mic. Tidy. I bet no one else has noticed that.

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