In the beginning was the word, and Webster’s saw that it was good. Oxford, Cambridge and American Heritage concurred.
Illustration by the great John Deering. If you see the “derp” in the window, that’s what John and I say to each other just about every day.

Sorry, guys. I have no idea why this didn’t publish earlier. Grrrr.

A lot of journalists, by the very nature of their jobs, are word nerds. We’re constantly trying to think of just the right words to convey the facts of the matter at hand in news stories, or our opinions in columns. Because of that, some of us get more than a little upset when heartless editors (ahem, me, sometimes) kill our darlings because they’re unnecessary, used incorrectly (as Inigo Montoya would say, I do not think that word means what you think it means) or don’t make much sense in context or tone.

How dare they! It’s like they think writing should make some semblance of sense or something! Gah!

When journalists work remotely for long periods of time, as our newsroom has since March, we tend to gravitate toward social media and our virtual workspace to talk to each other (being an introvert and no social butterfly, I’ve talked more on Slack with some of my co-workers than I have in real life). It’s there we learn a lot we didn’t know about each other, including how many of us might be a little too obsessed with words (is there such a thing?).

OK, that’s mostly me, but still …

If you don’t understand why there’s an International Left-Handers Day, you likely don’t understand Black History Month either.
GIF found on Tenor.

Last Thursday, an offhand comment started one such discussion (edited for space, and without commenters’ names, though my comment should be obvious):

“Happy International Lefthanders Day to all you southpaws out there. I think there are quite a few of us here, right?”

“I’m largely ambidextrous. Do I celebrate, maybe, just 12 hours today?”

“Ambidextrous is ‘hand-ist.’ It means ‘two right hands’.”

“That doesn’t sound right … But it is. What?!”

“‘Dexter’ is ‘right’ in Latin. Do you know what ‘left’ is in Latin? ‘Sinister’.”

“I’m sinister … I mean a leftie!”

“Word Nerd checking in. From the Online Etymology Dictionary, this tidbit: ‘Its opposite, ambilevous ‘left-handed on both sides,’ hence ‘clumsy’ (1640s) is rare’.”

“Rare and, if you’ll pardon the expression, clumsy. … A long, long history of discrimination. Don’t get me started on ‘left-handed compliments.’ For example, the English word ‘left’ derives from Old English: ‘lyfte,’ meaning ‘weak,’ or ‘feeble’. … When the flocks go up yonder, the sheep go to the right hand of God and the goats go to the left.”

“I am willing to be classified as ambisinister if it will heal all y’all’s wounds.”

(Ambisinister is indeed a word, meaning clumsy in both hands, so basically the same as ambilevous.)

Ned Flanders gives many diddly doodlies about his fellow lefties.
Image found on WNEP.

Much more discussion followed, as well as my quick newsroom survey of handedness (we seem to be overwhelmingly right-handed, including me, my boss in opinion, and our managing editor, with some left-handed and a few ambidextrous). That fits with statistics; about 10 percent of the world is believed to be left-handed. The Netherlands and U.S. surpass that percentage, though, according to Statista, coming in at 13.23 and 13.1 percent respectively. Only 3.5 percent of Chinese are considered left-handed.

While some cultures, such as the Incas, have revered left-handers, there has indeed been discrimination, most notably in the practice, common not that long ago in the U.S. and Europe, of forcing left-handers to learn to write with their right hands. (At least a couple of my colleagues reported that they were born left-handed and forced to switch in school, so they’re now semi-ambidextrous.) In China, says Discovery News, many Chinese characters require use of the right hand to write, so it’s more difficult for a left-hander to stick with the naturally dominant hand. In other parts of the world, the left hand is considered “dirty,” or as the Latin suggested, “sinister.”

One of my colleagues at the paper, Religion Editor Francisca Jones, had a taste of that belief, telling me, “When my niece was 6 or 7, she saw me write something and told me I was using ‘the Devil’s hand’.”

It doesn’t help when the medical term for left-handedness is “sinistrality.” None of the lefties I know are the least bit sinister. Darkly humorous, maybe … especially our wire editor, who consistently cracks me up, and insists that since he’s a lefty, he’s in his right mind (hey, what does it mean since my stroke was on the left hemisphere???).

I don’t draw this well with my right hand. If I tried with my left …
Image found on Inc.

Schoolmate Jan Austin Fields told me she was a lefty, but her four older sisters were all right-handed, “so I learned most things right-handed. Like throwing a ball. Using scissors. I write like a right-handed person as well. No smudges on my hand if I turn my paper sideways. I can shoot a pistol with either hand. I bat right-handed. Being ambidextrous has its perks.”

My nephew Dalton’s fiancee Amanda (yea!!! I’m a proud aunt) told me on Facebook, “I remember it was always hard for teachers to teach me instruments or how to use racquets, bats, serve in volleyball, etc., in school.”

I haven’t even played mini golf in years.
Image found on Florida’s First Coast of Golf.

Rusty Turner, a colleague in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s northwest newsroom, told me: “I am very left-handed. When I was in junior high, I decided I wanted to learn to play golf. My parents arranged for lessons and bought me a set of used right-handed clubs on the theory (promoted by the seller of the clubs) that left-handers hit better from the right side because their left arms are stronger. At my first lesson, the instructor saw my awkward right-handed swing and opined that seller’s theory had more to do with the fact that he didn’t have any left-handed clubs to sell us.”

I think the instructor was probably right.

One friend (right-handed) found a way to bring music into the mix, answering my question with a question of his own: Who is the most famous left-handed musician in the world. My guess was David Bowie (though he played right-handed, I’m told); David Kelley said Jimi Hendrix. But, no, said Laurence Gray, the asker of the question: “Paul McCartney of the Beatles. Ringo Starr is also left-handed. Lennon and Harrison were right-handed. I used to perform with a left-handed bass player at the local Blues Jam. This was the person who told me that McCartney is left-handed. The Blues Jam bass player said that he had to special order a left handed bass from the guitar company. Whenever I meet someone who is left-handed, I have asked them who is the most famous left-handed musician in the world and almost none of them knew the correct answer. One of the few people who did know the correct answer was a left-handed musician who plays guitar and banjo with a local folk music group. He had to special order both the guitar and the banjo because he is left-handed.”

I am so ready to hear a concert from this guy.
Image found on MusicRadar.

Consider me educated. And McCartney is worlds ahead of another left-handed “musician,” Justin Bieber. (Sir Paul needs no air quotes as he is a real musician.)

Business reporter Stephen Steed said, “I am left-handed with a writing utensil, for a fork, and for throwing a Frisbee (TM), er, flying disc. But I am right-handed in the major sports, except tennis, for which I swap hands depending on  the direction of the volley, and I am ambidextrous with cigarettes. And I never saw a spriral notebook that took lefties into consideration until college. … Scissors were a pain, too. Mine just gnawed at the paper, until my teacher (maybe in kindergarten) figured out what was wrong.”

Let’s Talk columnist Helaine Williams, told me, “I started hearing ‘Oh, you’re left-handed!’ as a child and wondered why it was such a big deal. I also received many compliments on my handwriting; some would say I had beautiful handwriting ‘for a left-hander.’ …

I still hate these things.
Image found on Pinterest.

“School desks were usually a nightmare. Ms. S., the woman who went on to be my favorite elementary school teacher (fourth and sixth grades), had a fantastic sense of humor … but she also was short on patience and had a hot temper. One of my first exchanges with her was my complaining about my right-hand-configured desk and her popping off something to the effect of ‘Well, maybe you need to get your mother to pay for a desk that would better suit you’.’”

Those desks were horrific for chubby kids too, so I feel her pain. And the world wasn’t built for short people, either. Then again, I don’t have to deal with trying to use things like scissors or golf clubs or guitars that weren’t made to take my handedness into consideration. One ambidextrous colleague told me that the older he gets, the more he uses his right hand because it’s just easier.

I can imagine it would be, (almost) all being right in the world, after all.

One more story caught my eye, from ActiveStyle Editor Celia Storey (one of my favorite people), which I share here in full:

“I just remembered a lady whose life story relates to the bias against left-handed people. She was 81 in about 1990 when she was one of my aerobics students at the Stephens YWCA. We called her Bruni. She was extraordinary.

“She was born in Germany, in Bavaria, I think. She had red hair as a baby, and the family didn’t want the neighbors to know, so they died her hair black.

“Bruni was left-handed but did almost everything right-handed. She was adventurous and obviously super smart. She said her family lived where some people still thought left-handedness was evidence that a child’s mother consorted with the devil. Also, nobody wanted to mess with teaching in more than one way. So they tied her left hand so she couldn’t use it. They warned her they would cut it off if she didn’t switch to her right hand.

Yeah, I’m not sucking my thumb if this is what happens.
Image found on Virginia Commonwealth University 19th Century German Stories.

“She told me about the 19th century children’s book she was read as a girl: etiquette through terror. Sucking your thumb? The Scissorman snips off your thumbs with his big shears. Mean to dogs? A dog attacks you and steals your food. If you are rude to a Black man, you will be dipped into a big ink pot.

“Bruni had been a Hitler maiden, because all the girls were; but her organizer hated her, she said, because her family was Catholic. She was always sort-of on probation. She was at a ceremony where she saw Hitler up close as he greeted her group. She said he had electric blue eyes and was charismatic.

“They were all starving during the war, and in the city where she lived, bombing was so common that every day she stepped past or over dead bodies.

“She did her required service term (the Hitler youth were assigned public service) as a street car conductor, and the street cars are where she perfected her English and where she eventually met her American husband.

“Bruni had only one lung because of some surgery. She was energetic and capable. She died in an auto accident. Somebody T-boned her when she pulled out of her neighborhood—going left—onto Cantrell Road.”

I really think I would have liked Bruni. She sounds like my kind of “always sort-of on probation” person.