The Puzzle of Left-Handedness

by Rik Smits

  There are certain circumstances in which making do is not acceptable, where nothing less than the optimum is good enough and money is no object. Architects, engineers and people trained in technical drawing, for example, traditionally used left-handed or right-handed drawing tables. Happily, equipment for dentists and dental hygienists is available in versions for left- and right-handers, and the same goes for the layout of operating theatres, which can be adjusted to suit the surgeon. In the medical world, much thought has been given to the hand preferences of those who probe, prick and cut us, and there have been debates about and research into the effects of left- and right-handed surgery on the success of specific operations.

  Still, the ease with which left-handers make right-handed equipment their own and the care taken in the medical world do not alter the deplorable fact that most ergonomists and industrial designers have a thoroughly nonchalant attitude to the interests of left-handed people, even when the consequences can be dangerous. It must surely be possible to invent a neutrally designed or easily reversible hedge trimmer. Of course there’s no apparent call for one; no left-hander would have the audacity even to inquire whether such a thing existed, since in his experience the answer has always been no. There will never be any demand without supply.

  Incidentally, this lack of creative interest and economic incentives has nothing to do with discrimination against left-handed people. Designers and ergonomists only tinker at the edges, they never stop to think about the business of hand preference more generally, as became clear when the electronic till was introduced into supermarkets in about 1990. The cashier no longer had to key prices into a cash register; she only had to pass each article over the electronic eye that’s become such a familiar feature of shopping.

  It was a laborious affair at first. If anything it was slower than the old method, since many items had to be swiped across the eye several times before the machine would register the price. Cashiers thought at first that the eye must be dirty. Everywhere spray-bottles of glass cleaner appeared next to the till and cashiers sat there diligently polishing their electronic eyes. It hardly helped at all, since dirt was not the main problem. A lack of thought during the design process had produced an electronic till that was ideal for left-handers and unsuitable for 90 per cent of cashiers.

  The old-fashioned supermarket till with its cash register was laid out so that the cashier sat with items on the conveyor belt arriving to her left. She picked up each article with her left hand and worked the till with her right. For left-handed people that was a trial, but it was the best conceivable arrangement for the right-handed majority: the left hand merely slid the purchases onwards, while the fine work was done by the preferred hand. With the arrival of the electronic eye the cashier’s chair was turned through 90 degrees so that she sat facing the side of a surface set at the end of the moving belt, which now stretched away to her right, with a cash tray in front of her along with a keyboard for entering the prices of unmarked items. The electronic eye was placed off to her left, since there, well past the end of the conveyor belt and the cashier’s legs, was where most space was available.

  Comparison of supermarket tills with the electronic eye.

  This seemed logical, but it had unanticipated consequences. Suddenly the shopping no longer arrived at the cashier’s left hand but at her right. That wasn’t a problem in itself, but it meant that the tricky business of making the electronic eye respond had to be done on the other side, with her left hand. Most people were none too good at that part of the operation. Nowadays the eye is no longer positioned away to the left but always straight in front of the cashier.

  36

  Writing and Other Useful Handiwork

  ‘Oh,’ the eloquent sixty-year-old said over his beer. ‘Yes, I’m left-handed, but at school they taught me to write with my right hand. And that was fine too. No problem.’

  ‘But now you write with your left hand. You even drink with your left!’ I slipped the beer mat on which he’d just scribbled his email address into my inside pocket.

  ‘Yes ... But at first I had to write with my right. So I just got on with it. Until I was thirteen. Then a teacher told me it was okay for me to write with my left hand if I wanted to, so I switched.’

  ‘I see. So you’re one of those people who were forced to write right-handed. Didn’t it bother you? We’re always being told that children start to wet the bed and so on, and stutter.’

  ‘Nah ... Not a problem. I can’t remember anyone forcing me, really. I always enjoyed going to school. Yes ... But I did have a terrible stutter, when I was young.’

  ‘You? Nobody would think so now. You got over it all right!’

  ‘Yes ... It lasted until about the time I left middle school. Until I was thirteen, then it just went away of its own accord.’

  ‘Until you were thirteen ...’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you started to write left-handed?’

  ‘Around then, yes, I think so.’

  ‘Might there be a connection? You started writing left-handed and promptly stopped stuttering?’

  ‘Well I’ll be damned. Never occurred to me. Wow. You know what – that could be it!’

  Left-handers often come up with intriguing stories like this about their educational experiences, especially in primary school. As children they run up against a great deal of incomprehension and ignorance from teachers. They have to conform to a norm that’s alien to them, or they’re left to their own devices but continually told they don’t come up to scratch. It seems they learn to overlook many things, the way this particular drinker never made a connection between his miraculously vanishing stutter and being forced to write with his right hand, and simply carry on undaunted.

  Instead of waiting for help they look around for solutions on their own initiative, with such success that in no time they develop into perfectly normal pupils. Ask a teacher to divide a pile of homework from a school class he doesn’t know by sex and he’ll carry out the task whistling and with a fair degree of accuracy. Ask him to put work by left- and right-handers into separate piles and he won’t know where to start. After a year or eighteen months left-handers are able to perform even that difficult trick of writing legibly, whether with their left hand or their right, just as well and as quickly as their right-handed classmates, despite the additional obstacles they face and the back-to-front education they receive.

  Nonetheless it’s unpleasant to have a teacher force you into all kinds of contorted postures your body is reluctant to adopt. You’d think the experience would inevitably leave its mark, but it’s impossible to find solid evidence for the stuttering, bedwetting and other nervous disorders said to accompany being forced to write with the right hand. Still, such stories are heard so often that we can’t simply dismiss them, especially when they’re told by left-handers themselves.

  Only a few decades ago it was still virtually universal practice to force schoolchildren to learn to write with the ‘correct’ hand. Enlightened teachers who allowed left-handed children to develop naturally, even perhaps managing to give them a couple of useful tips, were rare. Although excesses such as the strap or the tying of the left hand behind the back have been banned, the situation is not much better today. Even now in the modern Western world, children are all too often subjected to subtle pressure to give writing with the right hand a go. It would be better that way. Pedagogical wisdom has it that more than half of all left-handed children suffer from a secret ailment called ‘habitual left-handedness’ – they’re not really left-handed, they’re just pretending to be. The rascals! A characteristically right-handed form of concern about the delicate soul of the left-hander is common too; left-handed children are regarded as suffering from a sense of being misfits in a right-handed world. How treating them as children with special needs and an unfortunate natural preference could possibly help, goodness only knows. Another ineradicable myth is that our form of writing is so geared to the right hand that it’s impossi
ble for left-handers to master. Millions of left-handers furnish evidence to the contrary every day.

  All these worries among educationalists are absolute nonsense, there’s no other word for it. Anyone who has been left-handed since childhood knows that by the time a school pupil starts to learn to write his habits are firmly ingrained. Those in whom hand preference is not yet fixed but who eventually, despite all the right-handed models and examples they see, opt for the left hand are apparently not too bothered by the experience. Either that or they have quite different, serious problems. True, if you’re left-handed you may sometimes be bullied as a result, but the same, or worse, goes for the colour of your hair, your accent, your name, the braces on your teeth, the shape of your nose, the brand of your clothing, your eccentric mother, your test scores and an infinite number of other things. No one ever goes to a social worker or a psychiatrist complaining of left-handedness.

  The true reasons behind attempts to get left-handers to mend their ways have little to do with worries about their success in learning to write and far more to do with conformism and a misplaced desire for order. A left-hander disrupts the uniform image of the ideal classroom filled with children quietly beavering away, so he or she is forced to conform: all children must sit neatly two by two in rows, all with their arms folded, or all writing with the same hand. Left-handers create further insecurity by confronting teachers with their own incompetence, and teachers react by plunging their heads into the sand. They try to arrange things so that it seems as if the left-handed child doesn’t exist. The more authoritarian the education system, the stronger this tendency towards denial. The more pressure there is to conform, the harder life is made for left-handers.

  No one says this aloud, of course. Officially it’s all about how the poor left-hander will benefit. The most popular argument presented for making children switch hands in learning to write is that dreadful hooking of the wrist. It’s always assumed that left-handers make a smudged mess of their written work because they wipe the side of their hand through the wet ink, and because they can’t see what they’re writing because their fingers get in the way. This is assumed to lead to efforts to solve the problem by writing with a strange, crooked claw curled over the top of the line: the hooked hand. But this argument cuts no ice either.

  Two variations on that dreadful hooked hand.

  There are certainly a good many left-handers who write with a hooked wrist, often producing perfectly neat handwriting, but anyone who takes the trouble to look will see that a good many right-handers write in a similarly hooked manner. This seems bizarre, since it’s impossible to imagine a reason why a hooked wrist would be comfortable or effective for anyone. Yet it is quite common. If you examine the way adults wield a pen you’ll soon notice that there are ten or more ways in which people hold the thing. They include many that are almost painful to watch. Left, right and centre you’ll see pens clamped between three or even four clenched-white fingertips, held between an index finger and a middle finger and resting high up against the palm, or grasped in hooked claws of every shape and description. Left-handers don’t seem to adopt improbable writing postures any more often than right-handers do. There’s only one possible conclusion: generally speaking the teaching of writing isn’t what it ought to be, so children are often forced simply to invent approaches of their own, with variable results.

  Another ineradicable story frequently heard in the teaching world is that so-called crossed lateral preference is a terrible thing. This is a belief that goes back to old-fashioned ideas about dominant halves of the brain. It used to be unquestioningly accepted that a healthy person’s preferred hand, eye and foot were all controlled by the same cerebral hemisphere. Not only is there no trace of evidence for this, there’s not even a clear connection between hand preference and other preferences, and oddly enough it’s regarded as a problem only in the case of left-handed people. No one tries to convert right-handers into left-handers if they turn out to be left-footed or left-eyed.

  Still, we shouldn’t be surprised, because ultimately all this concern is purely for show. If a left-handed child can’t be persuaded to write with his right hand, then in most cases the expert simply gives up and leaves him to his fate. It’s a rare teacher who’ll take the trouble to learn how to present the correct left-handed method. Left-handers are used to this, of course, since as with other activities like knitting or woodwork they have to puzzle out for themselves how to adjust the consistently incorrect model they’re shown. Nothing can be relied on, other than meeting with contempt when they don’t fully succeed straight away. Left-handers include few enthusiastic young seamstresses and craftsmen for precisely this reason.

  The worst scenario of all is one in which a left-handed pupil is presented with a supposedly left-handed method of writing. It always comes down to teaching the poor left-hander a handwriting style that leans backwards, based on pseudo-scientific hocus pocus about natural movements and directions. This won’t help the child at all, since the angle of lean is completely irrelevant. Worse still, writing that leans to the left is socially unacceptable. It makes you look odd. Any amount of neglect is better than being thrown from the frying pan into the fire by being made to stand out.

  What all this amounts to is that left-handers in schools are still seen as problem cases. Even today teachers talk of ‘tolerating left-handed writing’, as if it were an undesirable habit. Left-handers are always treated as if they have a disorder, a shortcoming. They’re seen as high-risk pupils, almost as if they should be approached only in the company of a school doctor or psychologist. If anything is damaging to the mental health of left-handers and their ability to enjoy life, then it’s this.

  Another deep-seated myth is that left-handers tend to produce mirror writing. At school this too is a source of misplaced concern. Outside school it’s generally a straightforward misconception, but it can also be a trick that gains a left-hander a good deal of credit. It’s quite common for left-handers to train themselves when young to produce mirror writing and to develop an ability to do so reasonably smoothly and neatly, some with the left hand, others with the right. It would be no surprise to find that right-handed people can learn just as easily to produce fast, neat mirror writing with their left hands, since this particular trick has nothing to do with the act of writing as such.

  Much of the blame for the development of the mirror writing myth should be laid at the door of Leonardo da Vinci, who was left-handed and in the habit of writing backwards. We don’t know why. That’s a secret he took to the grave with him. It has been suggested it was a way of making his notes unreadable to spies and competitors, but this seems unlikely. His fifteenth- and sixteenth-century contemporaries weren’t so stupid and naive as to be fooled that easily. Leonardo came from a family of lawyers and writing was therefore a prominent aspect of his life, which in a still predominantly illiterate world and in combination with his left-handedness may have been enough to persuade the intractable, restless young Leonardo to make mirror writing his own – for fun, because he could, to be different, and to amaze other people. Sigmund Freud, inevitably, thought it had to do with repressed sexuality. On 9 October 1898 he wrote to Fliess, his pupil at the time: ‘Perhaps the most famous left-handed individual was Leonardo, who is not known to have had any love-affairs.’ Hmm.

  Leonardo da Vinci’s design for a steam cannon made of copper, with notes in mirror writing.

  There was considerable fascination for mirror writing in the late Middle Ages, and people tended to confuse it with left-handedness. In 1540 Giovanni Battista Palatino in Rome published a course in calligraphy that became a bestseller. He devoted a chapter of it to lettera mancina, or left-handed writing. He was referring to mirror writing, which right-handed people can produce more readily using their left hands.

  The confusion had set in well before then. Around 1560, sculptor and architect Raffaello da Montelupo, also a resident of the Eternal City, wrote in his autobiography about his experiences
as a young left-hander 50 years before. He wrote:

  I will not omit to say that by nature I am left-handed, nor that, finding my left hand more facile than the right, I used to write with it, since my teacher made no objection, being satisfied that my handwriting was good. I have therefore always used my left hand, whether I was writing or copying pictures from the Morgante, which we read from at school. As soon as I laid the sheet lengthways to write with my left hand,* many people looked surprised; they thought I was writing all’ebraica [in the Hebrew manner, from right to left] and that what I wrote would turn out to be impossible to read. I remember one curious event in particular. When I started to write out a receipt for a certain amount for a notary in Florence, I laid the sheet lengthways and the notary expressed doubt as to whether what I wrote would be legible. As soon as I’d written one sentence he picked up the sheet of paper, saw that it was perfectly readable and called out to some ten other notaries to come and look. When the receipt was finished, I wrote a few words with my right hand, because I was well able to use that too, even though I’d stopped using it to write with as time went on. As I’ve said, I draw better with my left hand. Once, as I sat sketching the Arco di Trasi al Colosseo [the Arch of Constantine], Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo came by and stopped to watch me. Now you should know that both of them, although left-handed by nature, did everything with their right hands unless they needed to apply force. They stood looking at me for a long time in amazement because, as far as is known, neither of the two ever created anything with their left hands.

  As Da Montelupo delights in telling us, left-handed people do not produce mirror writing but handwriting like anyone else’s. The only difference is that they write with their left hands. Without training, mirror writing is as difficult for a left-hander to produce as it is for the average untrained right-hander. Should a child just beginning to write have an urge to start at the top right corner of the first page of his brand new exercise book, a simple cross next to the left margin to indicate the starting point is sufficient to set things straight.