Southpaw

What do Julius Caesar, Paul McCartney, Marie Curie, Nicole Kidman, Albert Einstein, Rafael Nepomuceno, Prince William, Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Leonardo da Vinci, the husband, and our tyke have in common?  All are left-handed, and all have managed very well or are managing just fine, thank you, in a world designed for the right-handed.

Time was when left-handedness was less accepted.  Left-handed persons were looked upon as clumsy and awkward, even evil in earlier times.  Thus has the left hand been associated with the negative in the vocabulary of some of the world’s languages.

The word sinister, adopted by English from Latin, originally meant ‘left’ but has evolved to mean ‘evil.’  So has the French word gauche, which simply means left-handed, evolved in English to connote improper social behavior.  Left in German is links, a noun, while the adjective link means ‘devious’ and linken is ‘to betray.’

Closer to home, the English phrase left turn is commonly used as a metaphor for a cheating spouse, as is the use of kaliwete, from kaliwa, the Filipino for left.

Truly it is a world for the right-handed because even the Latin word for right is dexter while the French word is droit, thus the English words dexterity and adroitness, both meaning skillful.

Even the left foot didn’t get it as glorious as the right.  Consider not having the ability to dance and to thus be dubbed as being born with two left feet.

The word southpaw, meanwhile, was first used in 1848 in the world of boxing to describe a punch with the left hand.  It also refers to a boxer’s stance when his right foot is in front of his left, making it possible for a right-handed boxer to use a southpaw posture to mislead the enemy.

Today, studies show that left-handedness is at record levels.  There are three times as many left-handed people today as there were in the last century.

A professor of psychology at the University College London said that this surge in left-handedness may be attributed to the decline in attempts to compel left-handed children to use their right hands.  The social stigma thus of left-handedness is disappearing even if lexicon hasn’t followed suit.

The world may be designed for the right-handed, from knives to scissors and doors, but consider what the left-handed had done for the world, like Julius Caesar and his left-handed kind.  For starters, some of history’s most creative minds were left-handed.  If one out of every ten people is left-handed, it’s one out of every five members of Mensa, that organization of geniuses.

Our father was a lefty.  Considering genetics, a left-handed parent is bound to have a left-handed child.  I guess two of his children would have been left-handed.  My younger brother and I showed early signs of left-handedness. Our mother, I understand, nipped left-handedness in the bud by training her babies to reach out with their right hands.  I can’t blame her.  She was an elementary grades teacher at a time when being left-handed was still discouraged.

So I write with my right hand and learned too late that my grip of the pen is wrong; it’s my fourth finger and not the middle one that supports the pen.  It goes without saying that my penmanship could mistake me with a medical degree because it’s as illegible as doctors’ prescriptions.  I’m more comfortable if I take food from plate to mouth with my left hand and have the habit of scanning magazines from back cover to front.  And my left arm seems stronger.

So far, our tyke of a girl is sometimes confused about the letters b and d and writes an inverted s and z.  At least she had done away with writing Nanay as Yanan.  And I’m letting her left-handedness be.  I don’t have my mother’s patience anyway.

As for the husband, he had gotten the habit of bringing his left-handedness to extremes.  I know he has caught a joke or a broadside from me when he says that mine is a left-handed compliment. And with modesty, false or true, over his poem that was praised for its novelty, he had once said, ‘That’s nothing; I wrote it with my left foot.’

(30 Sept 2007)