Left handed people

[ItchyScratch]

Do you know today is
‘International Left Handers Day’

I am not left handed but all 3 of my kids are (which I find weird!)

Do you have any tales to tell as a left hander?
Are you proud to be one or is it a nuisance?
Did you grow up in the era when it wasn’t allowed 😳

I remember hearing on the radio that left handers have a shorter life expectancy... dangerous living in a right handed world it seems, more accidents etc.

I had a music teacher who told me she had her left hand tied behind her chair at school to change her. Monstrous.

I am def left handed dominant but have some weird extras, I play tennis with both hands, so I don't ever use backhand, except in a volley. I do ironing, and cutting, right handed too.

Ha, didn't see you there @pandemic, sorry, post!

Me, DP and DD are lefties but DS isn't... he always gets the table laid round the wrong way poor lad. The more important thing though is that i struggle to help him with writing because its all the wrong way for me

My dd and her three children are. I know my dgs gets annoyed at having to keep searching for left handed guitars when he spots a right handed one he likes.
My uncle was a brilliant left handed artist.
It’s probably more common than we think

One for the oldies: telephone mouth piece cable ( those spiral ones) constantly knotted and twisting up😂 thank goodness for wireless

I'm left handed but I use a mouse right handed and also Morris dance using my right hand

No one has problems with playing cards ?

Also (some) steak knives ...

It’s interesting reading this thread as it’s made me aware of all the stuff I do left handed even though I’m a righty.

I drive DH mad because I insist on having the kettle the ‘wrong‘ way round. I can only click my fingers on my left hand, my right just flaps about and nothing happens. I use a bat in my left hand, same as my two DC.

Apparently everything we do has a more dominant side. Eyes, ears, feet. One doesn’t follow the other either.

I've always wondered why there's such a fuss over left handed guitars, when pianos are exclusively right handed. Especially these days when a flick of a switch could reverse the keyboard, left handers mysteriously seem to cope ...

(runs away).

We are right handed but DD7 is left handed. It rarely comes up in any conversation and I can’t think of anything that has hindered her or anything we have needed to adapt . Her teachers didn’t even notice she was left handed until mid Y2. She has immaculate handwriting so no issue there and just uses regular scissors. Eats with her fork in left hand and knife in right the same as we do. Maybe this is unusual for a leftie and there are adaptations that should have be made but she doesn’t seem bothered by anything

Head of maths at our school was left handed and said that, looking along his top A level class, most of them were left handed too.

Another leftie here! I’m in my 30s so didn’t have any problems at school, apart from there only being 1 or 2 pairs of left handed scissors in the classroom and there actually were more lefties than that in the class. Hated writing in ring binders or chunky note books as the spine is right under my hand

I eat the ‘normal‘ way with the fork in my left hand. I use a computer mouse in my right hand, I tried it with my left and it just felt weird.

If I start a running race, I have my right foot forward though and would always launch off my right foot for long jump. I wear a watch on my right wrist but would carry a bag on my left

And yes to being sat next to a right handed desk buddy at school, clashing elbows, argh!

And playing rounders and the bowler shouting “LEFT HANDER!!!!” as I limbered up with the bat, and the fielders all rearranging

I come from entire family of right-handers; but almost every boyfriend was a leftie, XH a leftie, DH a leftie, good friend a leftie ... it's almost as though I attract them (or I'm attracted to them!). DS is a leftie, something which we have to keep reminding school - it's less obvious as he's not writing yet due to his learning difficulties.

It’s very common for identical twins to be one left-handed and one right-handed. This is indeed the case with my own girls, and over the years I have met several other pairs of twins like that. Something to do with mirror-imaging when the fertilised egg splits, though maybe someone else knows more about it than me and can enlighten us.

@JumpingFrogs

It’s very common for identical twins to be one left-handed and one right-handed. This is indeed the case with my own girls, and over the years I have met several other pairs of twins like that. Something to do with mirror-imaging when the fertilised egg splits, though maybe someone else knows more about it than me and can enlighten us.

Oooh I can't wait for the twins to write. They're 8 months, I may have a little while to wait.. Eats with her fork in left hand and knife in right the same as we do makes sense to me. Clever left hand does important aim work, dumb right hand just has to saw

@JumpingFrogs

It’s very common for identical twins to be one left-handed and one right-handed. This is indeed the case with my own girls, and over the years I have met several other pairs of twins like that. Something to do with mirror-imaging when the fertilised egg splits, though maybe someone else knows more about it than me and can enlighten us.

I watched a documentary years go about identical twins. They said they left handed people most probably had a twin early in the gestation. Before 4 weeks. That twin died and was absorbed by the survivor who was the left handed twin.

Obviously they explained it far better than I have. But I remember they said it would have been in the very very early stages of the pregnancy.

I've read that somewhere Dobby. Always creeped me a little being left handed

Ooh I'd forgotten about the fork/knife thing, I grew up in the US where there's a lot of swapping of knife and fork - fork in right hand for eating, knife in right hand for cutting and you swap them when you cut food (not sure I'm describing that ideally). I was taught to eat this way but I did it in reverse (fork in left hand), still swapping knife around when cutting food.
In high school my three closest friends all had European parents and ate with fork in left hand, knife in right, no swapping around and that was that, I never went back to the usual way I'd done it since being a toddler, it was like coming home. Was tickled to read the same of Bill Bryson in one his books (Notes from a Small Island mabye?), that when he came to England he discovered that everyone ate like him with the fork in the left hand.

Remember reading somewhere that the inventor of the sewing machine was left handed, that's why the needle is aways on the left hand side.
It was not Isaac Singer, but the man he bought the patent from.

Another leftie. Am in my late forties so there were no left-handed scissors or any other adaptations at school, but equally I was never penalised for being left-handed. The scissors were so blunt they hardly cut anything anyway regardless of whether a R or L hander was using them. I do have my own L handed sewing scissors now which no one else is allowed to use. And ts pair of very good L handed pruners for the garden. I always used a R handed bread knife at home so got used to slicing bread with it and now find a L handed one too difficult to use. I would like a L handed ladle for the kitchen as the lip on mine is on the wrong side. I did have a LH fountain pen but now mostly use a nice biro although I do still smudge my writing. I tie shoelaces very oddly but am not sure if it's due to being L handed. I had to ask DH to teach the DCs how to tie laces (all of them are R handed). I knit R handed because my mum taught me that way (I sat facing her and learned the mirror image) but I do cast on a bit oddly and I crochet L handed.
I used to go to the Anything Lefthanded shop off Carnaby Street in the 1980s, they had lots of things I had never thought of (they are still running an online shop)

I remember hearing on the radio that left handers have a shorter life expectancy...

That turned out to be mostly a statistical artefact, caused by (as mentioned many times in this thread) left handedness being strenuously discouraged in the past but less and less so in successive generations. So among older people there appeared to be fewer surviving left handers than there really should be. This gave the statistical illusion of more right handed people living longer. (Same thing applies to religion - there were headlines a while ago about religious people living longer but on closer examination, the numbers were shown to be due to decreasing religiosity in successive generations).

DSis is a proud leftie - even did her dissertation on degrees of left-handedness (and says she is only slightly left-handed but it's certainly enough to clash elbows at the table). Her DS is a rightie. DBro & I righties; both have 2 lefties each (and he also has a rightie). So of 6 grandchildren, 4 are lefties. That's quite a high proportion!

Interesting that some posters say that there is a higher number of lefties amongst techies and mathematicians. I am the only leftie in my family (blood and inlaws) and probably one of the most mathematically and finance-inclined. I am a lawyer but always felt at home with IT folk.

Lefties have shorter life expectancy because they have to adapt to a right handed world and can end up with more accidents as a result.