Consider the hands. Like other human appendages and organs that come in pairs, they are strikingly similar. Both human hands are amazing-capable of complex manipulations and exquisite caresses. Thus it is strange that men and women would choose one hand over the other as the instrument of their will, leaving the second in the role of assistant and understudy. And it is even stranger that over the millennia they would consistently favor the right over the left.
But the strangest aspect of this subject (sometimes called laterality) is that a small minority of mankind, ignoring righteous prejudice, taboos, social pressures and a hostile physical world, insists on using their left hands.
That man, alone among the animals, consistently shows a preference for using one limb over the other is a mystery that has puzzled thinkers for centuries. Archaeologists have left no bone unturned in their effort to discover what made man turn to the right.
Today, as never before, left-handers are under intensive scientific scrutiny because their individuality holds clues to brain organization, and they have become an important issue in modern neuropsychology.
At the same time, the old taboos are lifting. Parents and teachers are less likely to cajole or force left-handed children into becoming right-handers. The popularity of television sports is exposing millions of Americans to the athletic successes of left-handers, dispelling the old stereotype of the lefty as a klutz, Gerald Ford notwithstanding. Left is all right, and all right is all wrong.
One result is that the number of left-handers in the population is increasing. Jerry Levy, a psychologist and a ranking expert on left-handedness, says that in 1920 only about 2 percent of the school population wrote left-handed, but 50 years later, this increased to 12 percent. And it is the hand used for writing that is the determining factor, for most people, between left and right.
Suzan Ireland, editor of the Topeka-based Lefthander Magazine, estimates that the number of southpaws in the United States has nearly doubled in the last 40 years and that lefties now make up between 10 and 15 percent of the population.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that among Americans 61 years of age and older, only 6 percent are left-handed, but in the 18-30-year bracket, the share of lefties rises to 13 percent. And some authorities believe that if all prejudices, restraints, superstitions and other barriers to left-handedness were removed, one in every three persons would be left-handed.
The power of these barriers is formidable. In China and Taiwan, where there is intense social pressure against being left-handed, there are virtually no people who use their left hands to write.
In ancient Japan, left-handedness was grounds for divorce, but the pressures relaxed after World War II, and today the percentage of left-handers among the Japanese is about the same as in the United States. One big factor in the change is the popularity of baseball, a sport that favors southpaws in many respects. Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japan, batted lefty-as did Ruth himself.
In the U.S. itself, great progress has been made over the last 10 years.
– Specialty shops offering left-handed products have sprung up across the nation, and sinistrals can browse, in a counterclockwise direction if they wish, for such items as scissors and kitchen utensils.
– Public school and college purchasing agents are specifying that 10 percent of their desks be designed for left-handers.
– Savage Arms has introduced a shotgun that ejects spent shells to the left rather than to the right.
– American Catholics have been given the option of receiving the communion host with their left hands.
– In 1985 the right-thinking bishops of the Episcopal Church briefly debated the issue of discrimination against left-handers at their triennial convention.
– And in 1979 Bill Hobby took the oath of office as Texas` lieutenant governor with his left hand raised.
Consider the plight of those of us who, for reasons we do not yet understand, instinctively pick up a crayon or throw a ball with the left hand. The task is nothing less than adjusting to a right-handed world by doing things backwards. The first obstacle is parents. If the young southpaw survives attempts by Mom and Dad to tinker with the organization of his brain, he soon encounters the right-minded world in school in such ordinary devices as desks, band instruments, lockers, microscopes and pencil sharpeners.
The lefty`s problem with writing is that he has to push the pen or pencil across the paper, with his hand passing over what he has just written. The right-hander merely pulls the pen across the page, letting it follow the movement of his hand. Noted trial attorney F. Lee Bailey scored poorly on his law school exams because he couldn`t write fast enough with his left hand. He solved the problem by securing permission to take his tests with a typewriter, one of the few instruments in the world that favors lefties because 60 percent of the strokes are made with the left hand.
Watches are hard to wind because the stem is on the right, spouts are on the wrong side of ladles and most instruction books are tailored for righties. Broadcaster Vin Scully finds golf instruction books maddening. Other everyday devices that pose special problems for lefties are automobile dashboards and gearshifts, knobs on televisions, adding machines, doorknobs, cameras, fishing reels and guns.
Buttons on clothing discriminate against lefty women, but not lefty men. Women`s clothing has the buttons on the left side because in olden days wealthy women were dressed by maids, who could use their right hands, while wealthy men usually dressed themselves. A few things actually favor sinistrals: toll booths, drive-in movies and romantic dinners because if one party is right-handed, the couple can sit side by side and hold hands while still eating.
Carl Sagan reckons that in the days before Charmin and White Cloud, people used their left hands for hygiene purposes. There are many cultures today where it is considered unsanitary to handle food with the left hand, and the worst punishment that could be dealt to an ancient Moslem was to have his right hand cut off, effectively banishing him from society.
H.L. Mencken traced the word ”southpaw” to Charles Seymour, a Chicago sportswriter, who coined it in 1891 while writing about the city`s West Side ballpark. Pitchers faced west into the setting sun, so that their left arms were to the south.
Consider the language of the left and right. For centuries the English word ”left” has connoted craziness (out in left field), clumsiness (two left feet) and dubiousness (a left-handed compliment). Losers get what`s left, and in the process they get left at the starting line.
In Britain, a pejorative for left-hander is cackhander, ”cack” being slang for excrement. And in heraldry, the left-handed stripe across the coat of arms-the so-called bend sinister-is the mark of a bastard.
”Right,” on the other hand, is the word for just, legal and moral. There`s the right-hand man, the right-of-way, righteousness and Mr. Right. Even the word ambidextrous, which we take to mean equally skilled with both hands, translates literally as ”right-handed on both sides.”
It`s the same in every language. In Latin, left is sinister; in French, it`s gauche; the German linkisch means left and also unhandy; in Spanish, left-handed is zurdas, which also means wrong way; in Italian the word for left, sinistro, also means dishonest; and the Japanese word for left-hander also means heavy drinker. Chinese thought sees the right hand as the symbol of aristocracy, the left as the symbol of peasants.
Our current political labels derived from the pre-revolutionary French General Assembly, where the nobility sat on the right, the radical riffraff on the left. ”Sinister” originally was a neutral word, meaning pocket, because the right-minded Romans always had the pockets of the togas on the left side; only later did it come to mean hidden, sneaky and evil.
The Roman euphemism for masturbation was ”left-handed whore,” and a child born out of wedlock was called ”a daughter of the left hand.”
These considerations are not merely intriguing trifles; language can betray man`s deepest superstitions and prejudices.
Scientists currently are busily investigating the functional differences of the brain in an effort to understand everything from criminality to creativity, and it is believed that handedness has something to do with the way the brain divides its labor.
The jury is still out, and is likely to be so for a long time, on the questions of why so many people favor their right hand and why a few don`t. But Ireland of Lefthander Magazine says these theories are the most widely accepted:
– Birth trauma. There is a deprivation of oxygen during birth, causing damage to the left hemisphere of the brain.
– Heredity. Left-handedness involves the cooperation of two genes.
– Hormonal. There is an excess of the male hormone testosterone in the fetus, which slows the development of the left side of the brain and explains why three times as many males are left-handed as females.
– Environment. There are physical and social pressures to be right-handed.
Consider the stereotypical lefty: Weird, zany, clumsy and a little bit crazy. It is Hall of Fame pitcher Lefty Gomez inventing a revolving goldfish bowl that eliminates the need for the fish to swim. It is Harpo Marx auditioning for the Boston Symphony with the harp on his right shoulder. It is Quarterback Frankie Albert holding up the 1941 Rose Bowl game to watch an airplane fly overhead. It is Gerald Ford stumbling down the ramp from Air Force One.
On the other hand, so to speak, among the left-handed minority are such solid-citizen types as George Bush (whose present era of left-handed political power was matched only in 1974-76, when Gerald Ford was president and Nelson Rockefeller was vice president), Sandy Koufax and Robert Redford.
Nevertheless, scientists are discovering that there are real differences between left-handers and right-handers.
In April, 1991, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that left-handers tend to die, on average, nine years earlier than right-handers. The study was based on an analysis of death certificates in two California counties, and it showed that left-handers were more accident-prone and more likely to get certain kinds of diseases, be born prematurely or be mentally retarded.
On the positive side, a left-handed tendency among architects was noted at the University of Cincinnati in 1977. Left-handers are known to be overrepresented among artists. Leonardo da Vinci painted the world`s most famous smile with his left hand and survived the attempts of his grandfather to change him into a righty. Picasso was left-handed, and Michelangelo may have been.
At Iowa State University, they found that children who reason well in mathematics are more likely to be left-handed, and researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that children who scored extremely high on the Scholastic Aptitude Test were left-handed at a rate double that of the general population.
But nowhere does the left-handed star burn brighter than on the fields, courts and alleys of sport.
Consider the place where left-handedness and right-handedness reach their ultimate importance: the baseball diamond. Nowhere is job discrimination more blatant-lefties are excluded from playing four of the nine positions-yet nowhere have lefties succeeded more. About half of the members of the Baseball Hall of Fame are left-handed.
In 1984 two doctors from the University of Illinois Medical School reported that the best hitters are lefties. They examined the batting average of all players for the 1980 season and found that lefties batted .281, while righties hit only .260. Then they checked the lifetime average of the top 141 hitters of all time. The lefties came out at .322, the righties at .314.
Left-handers International was founded in Topeka, Kan., some 15 years ago by Dean Campbell, a left-handed wholesale beer distributor who says the organization is intended to encourage the manufacture of left-handed products, serve as a clearinghouse for left-handed information and ”promote the good life of left-handedness.”
The organization has established Aug. 13 as International Left-handers Day, holds annual conventions, and six times a year publishes Left-hander Magazine, which has its front cover where the back cover is on this magazine
–meaning that lefties can page through it using their left hands.
It also has promulgated a Bill of Lefts, which includes freedom to use either hand without interference from parents or teachers, freedom to offer the left hand in a handshake and freedom from employment discrimination.
For their part, right-handers need to understand that southpaws are tired of being left out, left behind, left over, getting left-handed compliments and being thought of as being out in left field.
So take a lefty to lunch this week. Just don`t sit next to him.
