by Rik Smits
As far as dexterity is concerned, therefore, left-handers will generally achieve normal scores on the Ford scale. Their reputation for clumsiness must be purely a matter of perception. They’re regarded as clumsy no matter how well they perform, and this isn’t so illogical as it may seem. Sometimes the cause lies in the design of instruments and appliances, which are not suitable for left-handed use, but there are other reasons that have nothing to do with the clumsiness of left-handers but everything to do with a lack of understanding on the part of the majority right-handed world for the minority left-handed world.
Left-handed people, for a start, do a lot of things the opposite way around, or at any rate differently from right-handed people. To the right-handed majority this always looks odd, even disturbing. The way a left-hander sets about knitting, slicing bread, or tying a necktie goes against all the rules deeply ingrained in every right-hander. One mother with a far from clumsy but nevertheless left-handed daughter was known to run out of the kitchen every time the girl started to slice bread, vegetables or meat, exclaiming that she couldn’t bear to watch those frightening goings on. Kitchen knives are dangerous things and ever since childhood it had quite rightly been impressed upon the mother that they should be used with great care and precisely as taught. Irrespective of the impeccable results of her actions, her daughter clearly had a habit of going against the inviolable laws of knife-usage.
Second, left-handed people sometimes use methods that seem a little strange, or less than elegant. One important reason is that they have received incorrect instructions, or none at all. The countless little skills that have to be learnt before we reach puberty are demonstrated right-handedly nine times out of ten, which is fine for right-handed children. They only have to copy the procedure as closely as they can. This won’t work for left-handers. They have to figure out for themselves how to reverse the process they’re being called upon to learn, if that’s possible at all in any straightforward way. Right-handers really ought to have more respect for the creativity of their left-handed brethren in practical matters, since they almost always come up with a perfectly good alternative, even if it defies right-handed rules.
On top of this comes the fact that the work of a left-hander often creates an awkward situation for the person who comes along next. Any right-hander allocated a desk that’s been used by a left-hander will be dismayed to find that all kinds of things are on the wrong side. Anyone attempting to slice bread that a left-hander has been at first stands a good chance of having to tackle a loaf cut at a slant in the wrong direction. The left-hander, by contrast, is completely at home with reversals of this kind. Nine times out of ten he or she takes over the work of a right-hander. It will therefore seem perfectly normal that things on the table are the wrong way round, that the lamp illuminates the work of the right hand rather than the left and so on. It no longer occurs to him or her to complain about the mess that a ‘clumsy’ right-handed predecessor has made of things.
Now we come to that other score on the Ford scale: body control. Left-handers have a poor reputation here as well, as if they were people who stumble and blunder their way through life like gangly teenagers learning to manage their suddenly much longer limbs. This is the kind of performance the French refer to as gauche, literally left. Again there’s probably little substance to the belief. No data have been collected on the subject – assuming it’s possible to design a test for such a thing.
Yet the absence of facts and figures doesn’t deter professional the or izers, people like the Canadian psychologist Stanley Coren, for example, who believes that left-handers are clumsy in social intercourse because they have a natural tendency to turn anticlockwise, whereas right-handers turn clockwise. As a result, the theory goes, they often bump into people.
Superficially this line of reasoning seems quite sensible. It’s a more or less well-known fact that the majority of people arriving at a fork in a path or entering a room have a tendency to turn right, and therefore clockwise. Supermarkets and exhibitions are often laid out in such a way that by repeatedly turning right you automatically walk past the maximum possible number of articles or artworks. It’s a tendency reflected in more formal situations too: all things being equal, if you’re required to turn around, you’re supposed to do so in a clockwise direction. In the armies of English-speaking countries the order to rotate through 180 degrees is simply ‘about turn!’ It apparently speaks for itself that you do this by turning to the right. In ballroom dancing most turns and espe cially the most complicated are to the right, which means that the leading man is required to turn on his axis and not around his outstretched left arm. This undoubtedly helps him to keep his balance. Accord ing to Coren, left-handed people have an irresistible urge to turn left, so they go against the flow and cause a great deal of turbulence all around them. He takes left-handed Gerald Ford as his prime example. It has to be said: the man was a master at that kind of thing.
Coren even carried out an ingenious experiment that appeared to confirm his theory. Appeared to, because as we shall see his reasoning was sound but not the conclusion he drew. The experiment went as follows. In a bare, square, windowless room, with the one door in the middle of the back wall covered with a curtain, he placed two precisely identical tables to the left and right of the centre, each with an identical chair, so that seen from the door, the room was completely symmetrically furnished. Before entering, the research subjects were given a pen and a list of questions and asked to fill out the answers inside the room. The list included questions about the participants’ hand preference, but in fact Coren was mainly interested in which of the two tables his subjects chose to use: would they turn left or right, and did their choice coincide with their hand preference?
The result was that the majority of subjects went to sit at the table to the right of the entrance to the room, just as they were expected to. They included more than two out of three right-handed people but only one in three of the left-handed subjects. The latter seemed to have a tendency to turn left that was 2.5 times greater than that of the right-handed. For Coren this proved the point: left-handers turn the wrong way, which explains their reputation as accident-prone.
But Coren spoke too soon, so pleased was he to have his prejudices confirmed. Look at what his results mean in the real world of a dance hall, for example. We would expect some 10 per cent of couples to be led by a left-handed man, the remaining 90 per cent by a right-hander. Based on Coren’s figures, a left-handed male dancer will make 2.5 times as many mistakes on the turns as a right-handed one. So if a right-hander fouls things up once in an evening by turning the wrong way, then each left-hander will do so 2.5 times. If there are a hundred couples in the dance hall, then the right-handed among them will cause crushed toes or bruised shins ninety times, with the left-handers responsible for 25 collisions, ten times 2.5. This means the likelihood that you have a left-hander to thank for a mishap is only around 20 per cent. Eight out of ten times it’s a right-handed klutz who wreaks havoc. That’s hardly a reason to single out left-handers as a particular target for resentment.
At fault two times out of ten and yet given all the blame, that’s surely rather unreasonable. Again it’s the combination of conventional wisdom and the way in which some people perceive what they’re seeing that causes left-handers to be regarded as clumsy, irrespective of the facts of the matter. If a right-hander treads on your toes, then he’s an annoying, careless character, and that’s an end to the matter. If a left-hander trips you up, then the reaction of people like Coren is to say: ‘What did I tell you? They’re all the same.’
Finally, popular wisdom attributes to left-handed people an inability to tell left from right. There may be some truth in this. Left-handers have learned since early childhood to reverse almost every activity demonstrated to them before copying it. This continues into adulthood: what right-handers do one way, they generally do the other. Worse still, what another person calls the right is often, for them, the left. It’s at l
east conceivable that this leads to permanent uncertainty about left and right. But let’s not forget Freud when indulging in this kind of speculation. Freud was a confirmed right-hander, who admitted to his friend Fliess not only that as a child he’d had difficulty with left and right but that even as an adult those paired concepts caused him problems. Spatial awareness was, he frankly admitted, not his strongest suit. Doubts of the Winnie the Pooh variety are clearly not the exclusive preserve of the left-handed.
35
The Things That Things Make Us Do
According to the ancient Greeks, at the beginning of time, before human beings came on the scene, the universe was ruled by the primeval god Uranos. His sons were the Titans, strapping lads of whom the youngest was Cronus. The rebellion of Cronus against Uranos marked the start of the everlasting rivalry between fathers and sons. It’s a struggle that every son, when he eventually becomes a father, will at some point lose.
In those untainted, pre-worldly times, some less than subtle things happened. Take the way Cronus stripped his father of power. He took an adamantine sickle in his left hand, castrated his sleeping father and threw the sickle into the sea along with his father’s crown jewels. Then the ambitious youth banished his unmanned begetter to the underworld for ever, taking his place on the throne of heaven until the day came when he in turn was violently dethroned by his son Zeus. Out of Uranos’ crudely severed testicles and the sea, Aphrodite was born, the goddess of love. So Cronus’ horrific deed brought forth something good in the end.
Like all myths, this story explores life’s eternal themes, the instincts we all obey. What makes it unusual is the significance it attributes to the left hand. Sickles are agricultural instruments that cannot be switched from one hand to the other and have always been available exclusively in right-handed versions. Cronus’ use of his left hand must therefore have symbolic significance. Maybe it was a way of emphasizing the unholy nature of his deed, a rebellion against the established order.
What goes for sickles goes for most other tools, appliances and machines: they are all made for use with the right hand, leading to thousands of minor problems for left-handers. Knives with one flat side are consistently sharpened in such a way that a left-hander will tend to cut on a slant. Scissors have loops in their handles that are the wrong way round for left-handers, causing painful rubbing, even blisters, and they are assembled the wrong way round as well. When considerable pressure needs to be applied, the blades, instead of being pushed together, are forced apart, so the material between them buckles – right-handers encounter this phenomenon when they try to cut the nails of their right hands. Measuring jugs with marks on the inside are impossible to read if used with the left hand; indeed, there’s a whole series of ordinary kitchen utensils that are not so ordinary for left-handers, including cork screws, saucepans and gravy spoons with pouring lips, and of course can openers. Then there are brooches and badges with pins that open the wrong way. A fish slice, fish knife or cake fork with a cutting edge is completely unusable for a left-hander, as are those modern plastic throw-away forks with serrations along one side. And rulers. The numbered marks run from left to right, forcing left-handed people to draw lines towards the zero, a source of irritating errors.
It’s astonishing how many things are designed for right-handed use. The arm of an old-fashioned record player, for example: it’s always on the right, as are the slots in coin-guzzling machines such as parking metres and juke boxes, or the grooves along which you swipe your debit card. The ignition lock on the steering column of a car, wherever you are in the world, is on the right, as are the most important knobs on audio equipment, such as the volume control. The buttons on monitors and television sets, if they’re not at the bottom, are to the right of the screen. This seems innocent enough, until you realize that as a left-hander you have to reach across in front of the screen to adjust the colour contrast. Film and video cameras are shaped in such a way that they can be carried on the right shoulder only and have to be used with the right hand. A stills camera is operated by pressing a button that’s always on the right.
There’s more. Irons with those flex-holders that are supposed to be so handy are a complete disaster. Suturing materials used in operating theatres and first aid posts are designed for right-handers, not to mention the rest of the equipment. Left-handed seamstresses and tailors find that the controls on sewing machines are on the right, and that a great deal of discomfort arises from the fact that they insert pins the other way around. When those pins have to be taken out of the material while it’s being stitched they inevitably have their heads towards the stitching foot, making them extremely hard to remove.
Electric drills have a blocking button, so that the trigger doesn’t have to be held in all the time. It’s always on the left side of the handle, which makes it completely useless for a left-hander – he switches that function off again with the palm of his hand. Downright dangerous are handheld circular saws, electric hedge trimmers and chainsaws. They can be used by left-handers only in a thoroughly irresponsible manner. Unfortunately the truly clumsy left-hander will be the one who fails to realize this. The situation is no better in industry. Factory machine tools and control panels always have buttons and knobs designed for use with the right hand. Sometimes even the emergency switch isn’t replicated on the other side.
Particularly odd is the way our clothes are made. In our traditionally male-dominated world, men’s clothing is buttoned and unbuttoned using mainly the right hand. Any man who breaks his right arm will discover that his generally so humble and cooperative flies have turned into an unmanageable, capricious monster. Women’s clothing does up the other way. This must be a consequence of our deep-seated tendency to divide and polarize. It condemns the great majority of women to a lifetime of struggling to button their clothes.
This may explain one of those bizarre differences between men and women. Men always unbutton their shirts before taking them off. Women approach the task differently. They undo the absolute minimum number of buttons and then pull their blouses or cardigans over their heads. If you ask them why, they say it’s too much trouble to undo and do up all those buttons. Ninety per cent of them are probably right: it’s much harder with your non-preferred hand.
Leaving aside the fact that the numerals are on the right side of the keyboard, the digitalization of the world has brought a number of real blessings. In the paper era the counterfoils in chequebooks always presented a particularly annoying obstacle to left-handed people. The fewer cheques left over, the lower the writing surface fell below the pile of stubs on which the left-hander was forced to rest his or her hand. Occasionally a bank might be willing to provide reversed chequebooks on request.
Many counters and ticket offices have been replaced by websites. This has made life easier for left-handers in one way at least. We have largely been relieved of those pens on chains that organizations obligingly placed on their counters. The chains were always anchored to the right, so that when the pens were used by left-handers they stretched right across the form that needed filling out. And the chains were often so short as to make the entire operation impossible.
Another boon is the disappearance of telephones with the receiver attached by a flex. It was always fixed to the left side of the phone so that a right-handed person could easily dial or tap in a number and then have his writing hand free. That flex perpetually got in the way of left-handers.
Left-handed people always adjust amazingly well. They use their non-preferred hand much more than right-handers do and so become better at it. Left-handed implements are occasionally available, mainly in the kitchen goods and writing supplies sectors, but they’re always hard to find. The only left-handed tools that are fairly readily on offer in the better ironmongeries are scissors.
There are good reasons why availability is extremely limited despite a theoretically enormous potential market of more than half a billion people worldwide. Generally speaking, by the time a left-hander
discovers that a left-handed version of an article is available, he’s already invented a strategy for dealing successfully with a right-handed model. Perhaps more importantly, anybody who gets used to working with a special left-handed tool will never be able to wield one belonging to someone else, the boss for instance, with the same degree of dexterity. So for a left-hander there’s only a limited advantage to be had, with the exception of things that are used by just one person in one place, or are easy to carry around. In general a left-handed person will prefer to make do with the less than ideal right-handed version.
This usually works fine. With good quality scissors the paper or fabric that’s being cut will buckle only if considerable pressure is applied. A reasonably practical solution is to use large, good-quality scissors for every cutting task. Only at nursery school, where children are given those awkward, round-tipped toy scissors, do left-handers find themselves completely stymied. A ruler, as we have seen, is perfectly usable for drawing a line of a specific length if you move your pencil towards the zero. That’s not an ideal solution, but it does work. It’s possible to compensate for the absence of left-handed versions of tools and utensils in a myriad of different ways.