Until people started researching left and right-handedness, it was pretty much thought that people were all one or the other. It isn’t the case. For instance, I’m primarily right-handed – that is, I write with my right hand and can’t write with my left – (not legibly, anyway) and yet I play some games, like cricket, baseball and golf with my left hand.
Equally, many left-handed people who write with their left-hand do some things (and by no means always the same things), with their right. It’s often thought that people who write left-handedly will also prefer to use left-handed scissors. In fact, in a survey done in the USA, in which 98% of the left-handed people wrote with their left, only 68% of them used left-handed scissors, the same number as who used their left hand to throw a ball.
I was in a bookshop at the beginning of the year, at a time when school stationery is in quantities enough to block the traffic, and was intrigued to discover that though the shop had thoughtfully provided a lot of left-handed scissors, they weren’t selling them anywhere near as fast as the right-handed ones.
In the USA, and other countries where cars are driven on the left, it’s possible that the left-handed driver might feel disadvantaged, because the gears are on the right. And I read an anonymous piece on the Net that claimed just this. Curiously enough I’ve never heard any comments from right-handed drivers that driving in New Zealand, or Great Britain, disadvantages them.
All of us who learn to drive, learn to drive partially left-handedly. Right-hand drive or left-hand drive, you can’t drive a car with one hand. To my way of thinking it’s proof that most of us are ambidextrous – or ambidextrous, if you prefer – to some degree. (Though having said that you can’t drive with one hand, I remember interviewing a man some years ago who drove trucks with one hand after losing the other in an accident – and he fished one-handedly as well. Put that in your pipe, left-handers, and smoke it!)
Lefties do have some problems with where they sit at dinner parties. The bumping-of-the-elbows syndrome is bad enough when people are seated too close anyway, but it’s worse when the hand that’s doing most of the work is the opposite one to your neighbours’. But a more embarrassing problem would be putting your hand out and drinking someone else’s wine.
And think about writing in a lecture room on one of those flip-up ‘desks’. Left-handed writers have to become contortionists to make use of them. If they decide to write on the pad on their lap, or with their knees folded up, they’ll be back to the dinner-party problem. And if they’re using a ring-binder with the blank pages in it, then there’s the difficulty of avoiding the rings. At some point in every line there has to be a decision made as to whether to leave a larger than normal margin down the left, or somehow hook your hand over the rings and try and make sense of the scribble later on.
If the student takes his lap-top into the lecture he may be partly better off, except that many of the more important function keys are on the right of the keyboard. Okay, using a keyboard properly is a bit like driving a car – done properly (or even with two fingers of each hand) it’s an ambidextrous-sinistrous affair. Nevertheless, help is at hand, and left-hand focused keyboards are now available, if not for lap-tops, at least for ordinary home PCs. Basically all your function keys are left-situated, along with the numeric keypad.
But the mouse can be a hassle, too – and again this difficulty has been resolved with left-handed mice. Okay, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of getting a left-handed mouse, you can swap the ordinary one over to the left-side. It takes a bit of adjustment to get the index finger to do less work than the middle finger, but it is possible. I know, I’ve done it to avoid overuse of my right index finger, and it proves we’re more ambi-whatever than we think.
