The Silent But Deadly Minority
You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at me, but I am a dangerous person! According to statistics, I will probably die nine years earlier than the majority of you. Every time I pick up a power tool, a pen or a pocketknife, I run the risk of injuring or killing others and myself. According to a work published in 1946 by psychiatrist Abram Blau, I am “awkward, messy, unusual, prone to criminality, and often mentally and physically defective”. I told you, I’m armed and dangerous. Don’t mess with me! What am I, you ask? I’m a “leftie”.
According to a 1980 study by Halpern and Cohen, the average life expectancy of the left-handed person is nine years less than for right-handed people. If you ask me, only a group of right-handed people would need to conduct an extensive study to prove that theory. I would like to get my hands on this study – or the researchers that came to that conclusion. I would like to lock one of these persons up I a room with a pair of left-handed scissors and a pile of construction paper. I would laugh in sadistic appreciation and delight to watch them try to write in a spiral notebook with clumpy bits of metal rings jabbing them in the hand. And don’t even get me started on the three ring binder from hell! Weed eaters, chainsaws, and leaf blowers are powerful and dangerous tools, but they’re no match for the three ring binder from hell – just ask any leftie. And that’s not all. Statistics show that over 2,500 left handed people are killed every year from using products made for the right-handed majority. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out…no wonder we die sooner!
As if the tools we use weren’t enough, we also have to try to appease other people who can’t appreciate our uniqueness. For example, I worked as a secretary in a real estate office several years ago. I had only worked there a day or two when the woman assigned to train me began boasting about how she had yelled at the woman who used to work there because of the way she filed. Was she filing the documents in the wrong location? No. She was filing the papers in the “wrong” direction. You see, this woman was left-handed and was only doing what came naturally to her. However, she was told to refile them in the other direction. What I didn’t understand was why the secretary – the one who is usually doing the filing, re-filing, and pulling the files in the first place – had to do something that was unnatural to her. Would it have hurt the others to have the papers filed the other way? Another thing that troubled me was the way this woman brought it up in the first place, because she knew I was left-handed. Was this her idea of a “subtle” hint?
Then there was the job I had in an insurance office. I didn’t make it past the sixty-day probation. One of the reasons I couldn’t cut the cake was that I put the paperclip on the “wrong” side of the paper. When I explained this to my counselor at Job Service, she had to hold back her laughter while typing it into the computer. Needless to say, I got my unemployment checks approved and was very relieved to be dismissed from that job.
I remember trying to cope with being left-handed in grade school. Handwriting class was the worst. When you’re older, bad handwriting is permitted. But when you’re first learning to write in cursive, they make you do that little slant to the right we all know and love. If you’re a typical leftie, the slant tends to go in the other direction. I suppose I wasn’t your typical leftie, because mine never slanted. My teacher marveled at my handwriting and said I had the “best handwriting for a left-handed person she had ever seen. Thanks…I think. For a leftie? What did that mean? Was it a left-handed compliment? Anyway, I was so proud of that as a child – to be a leftie that could write like a “normal” person. What my teacher didn’t know is that I went home many nights with hand cramps. I don’t know what happened to my handwriting after grade school. It seemed to go downhill from there, but I don’t think that’s necessarily related to being left-handed.
One of the greatest inventions known to man is the computer keyboard, although having the number pad on the right hand side is still an inconvenience for this leftie. But at least now I can type instead of write. No longer do I have to go home with those nasty pencil and ink stains on the side of my hand. They say the QWERTY keyboard is fashioned for right-handers, and that it slows down the left-handed typist. I don’t know about that because I have been known to type circles around many “righties”!
The statistics are hard to pinpoint, but it is said that about 10% of the population is left-handed. The debate continues as to its cause, and the reasons range from genetics to learned behavior. It is also said that if both parents are right-handed, the chances of them having a left-handed child are slim. Both of my parents are right handed and my older brother is also right handed; yet both my younger brother and I are lefties. I don’t know why both of us ended up being left-handed, but we were fortunate in that our parents accepted and even sometimes appeared proud of our uniqueness. However, I have to admit that often Mom used my trait as an excuse for my clumsiness (as if I needed an excuse). It certainly got me out of enough chores, because many times I manipulated her by purposely acting as if I was having a hard time doing something until she finally took the knife out of my hand stating, “Here, let me do it…you’re going to slice off your finger!” Then she would proceed to tell me to go outside and play (which was what I wanted to do in the first place). Even now if I’m doing something that looks “awkward” to her (such as slicing tomatoes) she offers to do it herself because I make her nervous. I am thankful, however, that I was never forced to use my right hand, such as was the case in schools as late as 40 years ago (discrimination against left-handers is known as “sinistromanualism”). Being left-handed can be an inconvenience at times, but I’ve never really thought of it as a curse. As a matter of fact, I have always taken pride in the fact that I am different and unique.
With everything I’ve mentioned, however, I do have mixed emotions in telling people I’m a leftie. When I was born, for some reason my brain couldn’t make up its mind whether or not to be left hand or right hand dominant. I don’t do all things with my left hand. For example, I use my left hand to write, brush my teeth, eat, and pick up my cat. Yet I bat right handed, throw right-handed, sign right handed, and use a right-handed mouse. When I tell people I use both hands they then assume I’m ambidextrous - which isn’t entirely true either, because whatever hand I use for one task I usually cannot perform equally with the other. Since trying to explain this to others in fifty words or less is an almost impossible task, I usually either tell them I’m left handed or just plain weird. It’s much simpler that way. Leave it at that, and let them figure it out for themselves.
I remember when I was a small child in grade school. The teacher asked who was left handed, and naturally I raised my hand. She then gave me these “special” scissors that said “LEFTIE” on them. Feeling particularly privileged to get something most other students didn’t have the honor of receiving, I then proceeded in a vain attempt to cut my paper using this special tool. Why wouldn’t it work? Simply this…I was holding the scissors in my right hand. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. With this in mind, I would have liked to take a snapshot of my teacher’s face that day when she came back to check on me!
I guess the most frustrating part about not being a true leftie is that I feel like a “minority within the minority”. That sense of truly belonging to a special culture of lefties is just not there because I’m right-hand dominant in so many areas. Don’t get me wrong…it does have its advantages. For example, I can fingerspell with my right hand while writing with my left (provided I’m intelligent enough to do two things at one time). I can also mouse with my right hand and write with my left at the same time. I can hold hands on a date and still be able to eat at the same time (provided my date is right-handed and doesn’t think I’m being rude).
I have always been an avid lover of baseball. When I first heard the term “southpaw” to refer to a left-handed pitcher, I remember thinking about what a stupid term that was. After all, what’s so “south” about the left hand, and why is it called a “paw” anyway? I remember when I first heard the term “switch hitter”…. I was ecstatic! I thought, “Finally, someone who is like me. I’m not as strange as I thought!” Maybe one of these days I can find a name that describes what I am and find others just like me.
There was a time I wouldn’t have been allowed to share these insights into left-handedness. Had I been born in my grandmother’s or even mother’s time, I might have been called a child of the devil because of how I picked up my fork, or had the “leftedness” beaten out of me for my own good. I’ve been told the word “left” comes from an Old English word that means “weak” or “worthless”. I prefer to think of it as “thinking with my right mind”.