They are among us.
Modern estimates put the number at about 10% of the population, so that means in any group of ten people, one of them is left-handed.
This may shock you, or you may be one of those who doesn’t even notice. You may even be that one-in-ten. If you are, allow me, awkwardly, to shake your hand, left-style.
Left-handedness has not always been so magnanimously accepted. In the past, children were not allowed to write with their left hand. This persists in some parts of the world to this day. The word “sinister” comes from the Latin word for “left”, and even in roman times it had the connotation of “inauspicious” or “adverse”. To add insult to injury, “dexterity”, meaning “skill or adroitness with the hands or body”, comes from the Latin, “dexter”, which meant “right’.
Gracie Bannister, a Power Apps/Systems Developer, at TRADOC, started out ambidextrous, meaning she was using both hands interchangeably. “I was adopted when I was 5 and my mom wanted me to choose a hand,” she says. “She didn’t tell me which one, she just said ‘You got to pick one’. So I just chose my left hand.” She seems pretty left-handed now, because she writes, catches and throws with her left hand, and kicks with her left foot. She does, however, use her right hand to move her computer mouse, which just proves that technology messes everything up.
Gracie finds writing by hand to be the most challenging as a lefty, “When you have notebooks, and I write in my notebook all the time, the spiral is on the left side, so you have to kind of change the position of the pen if you want to get right up to the left margin, before you can hold it the way you typically would when you write. And then as you’re writing, your hand is dragging across everything you just wrote, so it smudges a lot. I also can’t write straight. If you give me a blank sheet of paper, it looks like it’s aggressively going down and then the next line is aggressively going up as I’m trying to overcorrect the slant.”
Gracie did something called “mirror writing” when she was little, which is writing backwards, as if in a mirror. That is almost always associated with left-handedness, so it appears that Gracie chose the right hand to favor, or the correct hand, if you prefer. Leonardo DaVinci was a left-hander who used mirror writing in his notebooks, so I think we can expect great things from Gracie.
Some do not choose left-handedness, but have it thrust upon them, like Steve Connelly, a Business Analyst/Business Process Engineer working with TRADOC. His right arm was broken at birth, and he spent the first six months of his life with a cast on his right arm. Steve has a condition called, “Mixed Dominant hands”. “I’m totally left-handed when it comes to writing and throwing, but I catch with the right and I am right-handed whenever I pick up a bat or swing a golf club,” he says. It is common for people with Mixed Dominant hands to be Dyslexic, although Steve is not.
Being ambidextrous, with all of its right-handed root word bias, is considered an asset, especially when you are at a baseball game and you have a hot dog and a beverage at the same time, but its evil twin, “ambisinister”, with the left-handed Latin root word, means clumsy or awkward with both hands. Some people, maybe even some who write for the AMSGazette, manage to be both right-handed, and ambisinister.
Although we don’t have the breakdown of how many AMSGers are left-handed, it’s safe to assume that it’s more than just Steve and Gracie. Let’s all show them that we care and give them a high five with the other hand. Warn them first, no one likes to be smacked in the face by accident.
Wednesday, August 13th is International Lefthander’s Day, if you observe, please do so responsibly, it’s the left thing to do.
Written by: Jeffrey Dewhurst