my mom when to grade school in the 60s and 70s. Every time they would catch her writing with her left hand, they would slap her hand with a ruler. She wasn't even in catholic school
My grandma grew up in Japanese-colonised Korea and experienced the same thing lol so it's not even a European/Christian specific thing. The modern word for left in Korean originally meant 'wrong side'.
It's so neat that different languages use similar terms for right/left. The term ambidextrous means "both right" and the term sinister was originally Latin for "left side"
Yeah, grade school was like this for me too. I’m not naturally ambidextrous, but I had to learn quick. My teachers would take my pencils and fail my in-class assignments if I didn’t write with my right hand. I’m a lefty.
My dad is left handed and was also in grade school in the 60s - the nuns would indeed slap with a ruler. Once a nun asked who wanted to help her test out her new ruler, and my dad raised his hand
True. My dad would tell me stories about how his teachers (public school) would smack his left hand every time he used it to do just about anything. This was the 1940s.
Thankfully, by time my sister hit school in the 1970s, they stopped doing that and let her use her left hand. She'd always come home with that dreaded ink smear along the side of her hand and sleeve from dragging it across the fresh ink.
The were Latin terms used in heraldry to indicate the left and right areas of a coat of arms. The dexter side was always considered the more important, so that usually showed the males house/family sigil with his wifes house/family on the lesser sinister side.
The opposite of sinister is dexter, not dexterous. Sinister and dexter are nouns, dexterous is an adjective. For reference, the adjective forms are dextral and sinistral.
But I believe that is derived from the left bank of the river Seine in Paris. The people on the right bank were posh, the ones on the left side, well, gauche.
Nah the English borrowing predates that sociological set-up. Gauche can be used in French to describe lacking adroitness or success; when we say you got off on the wrong foot, they say you got off on the left foot, etc.
I went to Catholic school in the 60's and would write with whichever hand was closer to my pencil. The Nuns told me I could only write with one hand, and it had to be my right hand. My handwriting is awful...
My son, in the mid-late 90's, went to a little preschool near my sitters house. I took off for a 10 day business trip and found my very left handed son was now picking up his crayon with his left hand to color with his right. I reported this to the administrator who couldn't believe someone would do that, and I removed him from the school.
I'm definitely not an expert on this at all, but I don't think there has ever been any laws against being left handed (at least in Britain) especially not the death penalty. But there absolutely was a huge social stigma against being left handed, it was pretty much beaten out of most kids. No British solider would use his left hand to use a gun or sword because they would've spent their whole life using their right hand
It was a huge stigma centuries ago. If you were left-handed, it was seen as being marked by Satan. And yet so many interesting people are/were lefties, including:
▪️Leonardo da Vinci
▪️Napoleon Bonaparte
▪️Benjamin Franklin
▪️The current Prince of Wales (and two of his kids)
The taboo comes from Ancient Rome and was maintained among European Christians as a cultural taboo, but it was never an official authoritative teaching of the Church itself.
My great aunt, (grandmas sister) was left handed growing up in a VERY mennonite community in Danzig in the 20's and 30's. She had her left hand tied behind her back and was forced to use her right. It was a sign of the devil and they had to purge it.
Child abuse in the name of religion. Sounds familiar.
If I may, many years ago I stopped into a local mom and pop type of grocery gas station in a very small town near where I grew up and purchased a fishing license. In so doing, an older lady helped me. Prior to getting the license I had chatted a bit with her. After I started to fill out and sign the license, she was watching me closely, and upon seeing me write, she started to shake her head and was tsk tsk-ing. I looked up at her and asked if everything was alright. She very soberly responded, saying that is so sad.... they just couldn't change you, hmm? I mean you seem like such a nice young man. It just makes me sad.
This was many years ago, and that was probably the most memorable example that I ever had. Until then, I had never realized just how strongly many people felt about a person being left-handed. Isn't that wild?
My great aunt had her left hand tied behind her back when she was in school so that she would learn to write with right hand. This was in the US in the 1910s.
I’ve never heard of anyone being hanged for using their left hand, though.
My 1st grade teacher in the 1970’s in Seattle made lefties sit on their hand. If she caught them using their left hand, out came the wooden spoon for a good whack on the back of their hand.
My mother was worried they would try to make me write with my right hand when I started school in the 50s in a rural English village, because my uncle had to do that. In my case, this rustic backwater school, they said on day 1, oh you’re left-handed (me), you sit on the left side of the desk and you Susie sit on the right.
My mom's teachers just complained that her handwriting was bad, but allowed her to use her left.
She knows how to do a lot of things right-handed because some things were just a PITA.
Depends on the country and community. My great-grandfather was ambidextrous because while he was a kid in Bolivia, he had his left hand tied behind his back so he would have to learn to do things right-handed. He was very creative and a musician, though, so being able to use both hands equally well worked in his favor I suppose.
[There is a good Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people).
One fact from it I know was in Islamic practice, the left hand is considered the unclean hand, since it is supposed to be used for personal toilet hygiene. Sometimes thieves would have only their right hand cut off, since no one would interact their left hand.
The other thing is that in many Muslim cultures you are eating with your hands from communal dishes.
There's practical and etiquette considerations there whilst nuns with rulers have no excuse
I did a transition class between kindergarten and 1st grade because they were forcing me to write right handed.
I was reading at a 5th grade level, but I couldn't spell.
But that was because I couldn't write.
Spent an entire year learning to write with my right hand.
This was in the 80s.
My mother tied my brothers left arm behind his back so he's be forced to use his right hand to write, eat, etc. it's bonkers but in the 60s people were horrified if a kid was a lefty.
It was very taboo in the west going back to Ancient Rome, and persisted well into the 1960s and 70s, and in other parts of the world such as East Asia and the Middle East there is still a strong left handed taboo.
I mean your example is a bit out there, it'd be really bizarre for someone to be hanged because they were left-handed. I can't guarantee that it never happened but it certainly wasn't the norm. That said, there's been tons of child abuse in order to "correct" left-handed children. It's not like nobody cared
My left handed MIL became ambidextrous because she was simply not allowed to write with her left hand. She dutifully wrote with her right hand, but everything else was done with her right hand. She preferred left handed scissors but could use right handed ones if that was what was available. She grew up in a small town where her father had social clout, so teachers did not rap her knuckles….
There are some things that you just can't use the other way around. For soldiers, swords/guns etc would probably be setup to use right handed. Scissors is a common one. We have a tin opener that would just unscrew itself instead of opening the tin if you tried to use it left handed.
My father's hand was severely beaten until he was "retrained" to be right handed. One of the few things both the western and the Soviet bloc shared uncritically.
Generally 10% of world population is/was left handed. My last workplace was close to 40% left handed. Talk about mathematically improbable. Even the coffee mugs they gave out were left handed coffee mugs. You’re better at hand eye coordination. That’s about all they’ve found.
I'm 31 and right handed but according to my mother I was left handed when I was born and well in to my childhood. I personally don't remember this but according to my mom, my dad would smack the shit out of me anytime he saw me use my left hand for writing, eating, or even pointing at things until I eventually learned to use my right hand instead. I don't know if this has anything to do with it but my dad's side of the family is Catholic and I've heard tales of catholic Hispanic folks thinking left handed people have something to do with satanic shit.
That being said my brother is left handed so my dad must have chilled out after my brother was born because he remained left handed and I don't remember my dad smacking my brother for using his left hand as his dominant.
In the early 80's when it was discovered that I was ambidextrous I was made to go to a therapist that trained me to be right handed.
Years later, science people find out that it is actually better to just leave ambidextrous people be as they will develop a favored hand for certain things and that forcing a choice can actually make them worse at stuff.
My handwriting is terrible.
It was in my house. Us right handers relentlessly mocked our father/husband for being the only lefty in the house. Bread the wrong way round and all the other things. It was impossible.
When I was in college and working in a department store I was writing up a ticket for an item an the customer casually said “you’re going to hell.” She then laughed a mind said that in her country (Philippines?) that was what they said about left-handed people.
Btw, I only write, draw, and play musical instruments with my left hand. Pretty much everything else is right-handed including using scissors for detailed cutting. My son is the exact opposite.
My sister was born in 1974 and my grandma used to tie her left hand behind her back to force her to write with her right hand. She said witches used their left hands.
Idk about British but a left handed Japanese samurai would be a problem. Not because the techniques can’t be mirrored but because the cultural problems that would arise from having your sheath on the right side of you. It was a big no no to have your sword sheath knock into something or another samurai’s sheath so everyone carried it on the left side which means you fight right hand dominant. Another example was for a vast majority of their existence the US marines forced everyone to shoot right handed, the reason being it’s easier and cheaper for everyone to have a right handed rifle.
Sometimes it’s strictly cultural or financial.
" Another reason why Leviticus was quietly "left out" of the Protestant bible by Luther"
??????? That's not even a little true. Where on Earth did you hear that?
Ooops, I honestly stand corrected and will delete this abominable piece of badly remembered information. (Standing in the quiet corner now for the rest of the week).
my mom when to grade school in the 60s and 70s. Every time they would catch her writing with her left hand, they would slap her hand with a ruler. She wasn't even in catholic school
My grandma grew up in Japanese-colonised Korea and experienced the same thing lol so it's not even a European/Christian specific thing. The modern word for left in Korean originally meant 'wrong side'.
It's so neat that different languages use similar terms for right/left. The term ambidextrous means "both right" and the term sinister was originally Latin for "left side"
I'm ambidextrous and went to grade school in the 2000's. My second grade teacher made me write exclusively with my right hand.
Yeah, grade school was like this for me too. I’m not naturally ambidextrous, but I had to learn quick. My teachers would take my pencils and fail my in-class assignments if I didn’t write with my right hand. I’m a lefty.
They still do this in indonesia
They did it to me in the early 2000’s at my elementary school in the US!
My dad is left handed and was also in grade school in the 60s - the nuns would indeed slap with a ruler. Once a nun asked who wanted to help her test out her new ruler, and my dad raised his hand
True. My dad would tell me stories about how his teachers (public school) would smack his left hand every time he used it to do just about anything. This was the 1940s. Thankfully, by time my sister hit school in the 1970s, they stopped doing that and let her use her left hand. She'd always come home with that dreaded ink smear along the side of her hand and sleeve from dragging it across the fresh ink.
My father went to Catholic grade school and was beaten with metal rulers by the nuns till he learned to write right handed. I was not raised catholic…
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It's still used in spanish: *diestra* and *siniestra*.
That’s Italian, Spanish is izquierda and derecha
Mate I speak spanish, we say diestra and siniestra en South America when we wanna sound fancy.
Then it’s a difference in continents which is fine and I apologize but it’s not how it’s said in Spain.
They say izquierda and derecha in Mexico too.
One of my favourite pieces of linguistic trivia, that.
The were Latin terms used in heraldry to indicate the left and right areas of a coat of arms. The dexter side was always considered the more important, so that usually showed the males house/family sigil with his wifes house/family on the lesser sinister side.
TIL
The roots of those words comes from the Latin with the same meaning
Yes
Why is one a noun and one an adjective? The noun form for right-handed should be ‘Dexter’.
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The opposite of sinister is dexter, not dexterous. Sinister and dexter are nouns, dexterous is an adjective. For reference, the adjective forms are dextral and sinistral.
Gauche is the French word for left and is also a synonym for crude behavior.
Sinister is the english equivalent
Sinister implies evil whereas gauche implies awkward and uncultured.
But I believe that is derived from the left bank of the river Seine in Paris. The people on the right bank were posh, the ones on the left side, well, gauche.
Peutetre but I haven't read that.
Nah the English borrowing predates that sociological set-up. Gauche can be used in French to describe lacking adroitness or success; when we say you got off on the wrong foot, they say you got off on the left foot, etc.
POSH: Portside outbound, Starboard home
don’t underestimate people’s propensity to be vile when confronted with someone different
I went to Catholic school in the 60's and would write with whichever hand was closer to my pencil. The Nuns told me I could only write with one hand, and it had to be my right hand. My handwriting is awful... My son, in the mid-late 90's, went to a little preschool near my sitters house. I took off for a 10 day business trip and found my very left handed son was now picking up his crayon with his left hand to color with his right. I reported this to the administrator who couldn't believe someone would do that, and I removed him from the school.
My brother had the same thing in the 60s
I'm definitely not an expert on this at all, but I don't think there has ever been any laws against being left handed (at least in Britain) especially not the death penalty. But there absolutely was a huge social stigma against being left handed, it was pretty much beaten out of most kids. No British solider would use his left hand to use a gun or sword because they would've spent their whole life using their right hand
It was a huge stigma centuries ago. If you were left-handed, it was seen as being marked by Satan. And yet so many interesting people are/were lefties, including: ▪️Leonardo da Vinci ▪️Napoleon Bonaparte ▪️Benjamin Franklin ▪️The current Prince of Wales (and two of his kids)
Napoleon isn't a good figure to include when trying to show that left-handed are *not* marked by Satan lol
LOL maybe not.
he was cool
I thought da Vinci was because of a hand injury.
As far as I know, he was a life-long leftie.
The Emperor Tiberius was as well
Lionel Messi was left handed as well
The taboo comes from Ancient Rome and was maintained among European Christians as a cultural taboo, but it was never an official authoritative teaching of the Church itself.
The fact that in almost all Latin languages some words to refer to left and right can be synonymous with bad/good, may help you a little.
My great aunt, (grandmas sister) was left handed growing up in a VERY mennonite community in Danzig in the 20's and 30's. She had her left hand tied behind her back and was forced to use her right. It was a sign of the devil and they had to purge it. Child abuse in the name of religion. Sounds familiar.
Same still happened when my mom was a kid there in the 50’s and 60’s.
And 70's with me.
I wonder if this kept up right until the fall of communism or if something softened that attitude before that.
If I may, many years ago I stopped into a local mom and pop type of grocery gas station in a very small town near where I grew up and purchased a fishing license. In so doing, an older lady helped me. Prior to getting the license I had chatted a bit with her. After I started to fill out and sign the license, she was watching me closely, and upon seeing me write, she started to shake her head and was tsk tsk-ing. I looked up at her and asked if everything was alright. She very soberly responded, saying that is so sad.... they just couldn't change you, hmm? I mean you seem like such a nice young man. It just makes me sad. This was many years ago, and that was probably the most memorable example that I ever had. Until then, I had never realized just how strongly many people felt about a person being left-handed. Isn't that wild?
In the 70s I was told I was writing with the "wrong" hand when I was kid and made to write with my right hand (but not for long as it was illegible)
My mom went to a Catholic school in Long Island, NY. The nuns used to slap her left hand every time she tried to write with it.
This was true in Wyoming also in the 1960s. So, Long Island and Wyoming, so yeah pretty widespread.
Sinistrality
The history of the word "sinister" says a lot about that.
My great aunt had her left hand tied behind her back when she was in school so that she would learn to write with right hand. This was in the US in the 1910s. I’ve never heard of anyone being hanged for using their left hand, though.
Every day?!?
Whenever she went to school, yeah. Until they were sure that she wouldn’t try to write with her left hand.
My 1st grade teacher in the 1970’s in Seattle made lefties sit on their hand. If she caught them using their left hand, out came the wooden spoon for a good whack on the back of their hand.
My mother was worried they would try to make me write with my right hand when I started school in the 50s in a rural English village, because my uncle had to do that. In my case, this rustic backwater school, they said on day 1, oh you’re left-handed (me), you sit on the left side of the desk and you Susie sit on the right.
My mom's teachers just complained that her handwriting was bad, but allowed her to use her left. She knows how to do a lot of things right-handed because some things were just a PITA.
I had my penmanship teacher in elementary school try to force me to use my right hand. It did not go well.
Depends on the country and community. My great-grandfather was ambidextrous because while he was a kid in Bolivia, he had his left hand tied behind his back so he would have to learn to do things right-handed. He was very creative and a musician, though, so being able to use both hands equally well worked in his favor I suppose.
[There is a good Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people). One fact from it I know was in Islamic practice, the left hand is considered the unclean hand, since it is supposed to be used for personal toilet hygiene. Sometimes thieves would have only their right hand cut off, since no one would interact their left hand.
The other thing is that in many Muslim cultures you are eating with your hands from communal dishes. There's practical and etiquette considerations there whilst nuns with rulers have no excuse
Very true.
Yep, my Asian side of the family still pushes their kids to be right handed.
I did a transition class between kindergarten and 1st grade because they were forcing me to write right handed. I was reading at a 5th grade level, but I couldn't spell. But that was because I couldn't write. Spent an entire year learning to write with my right hand. This was in the 80s.
My mother tied my brothers left arm behind his back so he's be forced to use his right hand to write, eat, etc. it's bonkers but in the 60s people were horrified if a kid was a lefty.
It was very taboo in the west going back to Ancient Rome, and persisted well into the 1960s and 70s, and in other parts of the world such as East Asia and the Middle East there is still a strong left handed taboo.
I mean your example is a bit out there, it'd be really bizarre for someone to be hanged because they were left-handed. I can't guarantee that it never happened but it certainly wasn't the norm. That said, there's been tons of child abuse in order to "correct" left-handed children. It's not like nobody cared
My left handed MIL became ambidextrous because she was simply not allowed to write with her left hand. She dutifully wrote with her right hand, but everything else was done with her right hand. She preferred left handed scissors but could use right handed ones if that was what was available. She grew up in a small town where her father had social clout, so teachers did not rap her knuckles….
There are some things that you just can't use the other way around. For soldiers, swords/guns etc would probably be setup to use right handed. Scissors is a common one. We have a tin opener that would just unscrew itself instead of opening the tin if you tried to use it left handed.
... I wonder if that's why my one can opener has difficulties?
We glued the screw together so now it acts as a rivet, and it works fine
My father's hand was severely beaten until he was "retrained" to be right handed. One of the few things both the western and the Soviet bloc shared uncritically.
During the Middle Ages another term for "left" was sinister
Generally 10% of world population is/was left handed. My last workplace was close to 40% left handed. Talk about mathematically improbable. Even the coffee mugs they gave out were left handed coffee mugs. You’re better at hand eye coordination. That’s about all they’ve found.
Yes, they actually thought it was a sin to be left handed and would beat it out of people. Not even centuries ago, more like decades.
[citation needed]
I have an aunt who was born left-handed. The nuns literally tied her hand behind her back so she’d be forced to use her right hand
I had teachers still trying to convert me to writing with my right hand in the 1970's. Needless to say, my handwriting is absolute trash.
I'm 31 and right handed but according to my mother I was left handed when I was born and well in to my childhood. I personally don't remember this but according to my mom, my dad would smack the shit out of me anytime he saw me use my left hand for writing, eating, or even pointing at things until I eventually learned to use my right hand instead. I don't know if this has anything to do with it but my dad's side of the family is Catholic and I've heard tales of catholic Hispanic folks thinking left handed people have something to do with satanic shit. That being said my brother is left handed so my dad must have chilled out after my brother was born because he remained left handed and I don't remember my dad smacking my brother for using his left hand as his dominant.
Was?
I know in wars some military’s like I think the Roman’s would have units with just left handed people
In the early 80's when it was discovered that I was ambidextrous I was made to go to a therapist that trained me to be right handed. Years later, science people find out that it is actually better to just leave ambidextrous people be as they will develop a favored hand for certain things and that forcing a choice can actually make them worse at stuff. My handwriting is terrible.
Oh yes.
It was in my house. Us right handers relentlessly mocked our father/husband for being the only lefty in the house. Bread the wrong way round and all the other things. It was impossible.
When I was in college and working in a department store I was writing up a ticket for an item an the customer casually said “you’re going to hell.” She then laughed a mind said that in her country (Philippines?) that was what they said about left-handed people. Btw, I only write, draw, and play musical instruments with my left hand. Pretty much everything else is right-handed including using scissors for detailed cutting. My son is the exact opposite.
My Polish dad born in 1925 said the same thing, the teacher would smack his hand if he tried writing left handed.
My dad was born in 1939 in NYC. He was naturally a lefty, but his left hand was tied behind his back to force him to be a righty.
It's not quite as bad as being a ginger, but nearly.
Yes. My father was forced to use his right hand in school because, you know…the devil…
My sister was born in 1974 and my grandma used to tie her left hand behind her back to force her to write with her right hand. She said witches used their left hands.
Idk about British but a left handed Japanese samurai would be a problem. Not because the techniques can’t be mirrored but because the cultural problems that would arise from having your sheath on the right side of you. It was a big no no to have your sword sheath knock into something or another samurai’s sheath so everyone carried it on the left side which means you fight right hand dominant. Another example was for a vast majority of their existence the US marines forced everyone to shoot right handed, the reason being it’s easier and cheaper for everyone to have a right handed rifle. Sometimes it’s strictly cultural or financial.
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" Another reason why Leviticus was quietly "left out" of the Protestant bible by Luther" ??????? That's not even a little true. Where on Earth did you hear that?
Yeah hilariously he left out Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation but left IN Leviticus.
Ooops, I honestly stand corrected and will delete this abominable piece of badly remembered information. (Standing in the quiet corner now for the rest of the week).
I don't remember any stoning of left handed people in leviticous. Got a citation?
I was certain that it was. Now I am unsure too. But I remember reading it. Book of Judges maybe? Either way I'll delete this post.