Today’s word may seem very normal and dull:
Car, ker or caur
depending on how you spell it. But I’m not talking about an automobile or the dining car on a train. No, this is a Scots word for “left-handed”. You can also say “carry, corrie-fisted, carry-handed, car-handit” [1] or, my father’s favourite usage, “cag-handed”. Not to mention “sinister”, which comes from the Latin for “left”. And “south-paw” – I gather that came from the layout of baseball parks.
So many words just for being one of 11% of the population instead of one of the “normal” 89%. What is it about lefties that makes the rest of the world feel the need to treat them differently? After all, some pretty brilliant people have been left-handers: Marie Curie, Winston Churchill, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, as well as 4 of the last 7 Presidents of the US (OK, not all of them come in the “brilliant” category). A lot of famous artists, musicians and sportsmen, including Paul McCartney, Jimmi Hendrix, John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova and Rafael Nadal, were/are lefties. Is the rest of the world jealous?
There’s been a lot of research into why such a small proportion of the population is left-handed and the answer seems to be that it’s largely because we are a social bunch and we like those who are like us (which maybe answers the questions in the previous paragraph, too). This comment, from livescience.com [2], made me giggle: “If societies were entirely cooperative everyone would be same-handed, Abrams said. But if competition were more important, one could expect the population to be 50-50. The new model
can predict accurately the percentage of left-handers in a group—humans, parrots, baseball players, golfers—based on the degrees of cooperation and competition in the social interaction”. (What does that say about baseball players and golfers…?)
One possible reason the number of lefties seems to be growing at the moment is that they are allowed to be themselves at school, instead of being forced to be righties. That, I gather, goes back to the industrial revolution: factory machinery was designed for right-handers [3]. Left-handers were a nuisance so society tried to force them into the “useful” mould. It’s never worked before, but humanity is well-known for not learning from earlier lessons!
It’s not just factory machines that are designed for right-handers: everything from exercise books and scissors to guns and musical instruments is aimed at the rightie market. Maybe that’s why the opposite of sinister, dexter/dextrous, is used to mean “good with your hands” – because the tools made lefties cag-handed. Anyway, now there’s an increasing number of sites devoted to left-handedness, to products that work for lefties and a celebration of all things “car”. Which can only be A Good Thing. Enjoy diversity, rejoice in difference!
And tomorrow there’ll be another word to ponder.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, I’m a rightie, but there are several lefties in my family.
Sources:
[1] Pocket Scots Dictionary, Scottish National Dictionary Association, 1988.
[2] http://www.livescience.com/19968-study-reveals-lefties-rare.html, accessed 1.2.2015.
[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1563339/Number-of-left-handers-rises-sharply.html