I'm right eye dominant, though, so I throw, swing, shoot, use scissors, play instruments and use a mouse right handed.
I'm not at all ambidextrous, I can't do most of those things with my other hand.
Things get much more interesting with more complex things like golf, snowboarding & skateboarding, shooting, etc. These things all have left-hand optimized equivalants (eg: left handed clubs, snowboards with the bindings set top "goofy", guns with the safety on the opposite side, etc). In all cases its a tradeoff -- you can learn and get good on the equipment designed just for you and then wind up sucking when you are handed equipment that is used by most everybody else or you can just learn to use the "normal" equipment even if slightly suboptimal. Guns, for example, eject their used shells off the right side of the weapon--good luck getting one that ejects off the left side so you can old it opposite of everybody and not have hot metal land on your face.
Computer mice are the same deal... some of those bastards are even molded explicitly for right hand use and are pretty uncomfortable in the left hand.
Being left handed gets weird quick because you are in a minority that most product designers simply don't consider.
All of that said, I've found the golden path of learning any new tool that has a specific handedness is just to practice doing it right handed. This is especially true of anything that is a kind of "place setting", I eat with a knife & fork in the right-handed pattern, I use a computer mouse with my right hand. If I'm going to sit down somewhere and have an array of items in front of me with an 'expected' handedness, I'll just do it that way.
I do still resent it though.
They do in fact make a difference. Trimming my beard with beard scissors requires a bit of a strange grip in my left hand to actually cut well when I switch sides.
One big difference is visibility. On right-handed scissors you can see the cut from the (top) left, while left-handed ones are the opposite. If you cut lefty with righty scissors you can't see what you're doing (unless you awkwardly hold everything to the right side).
Left-handed watches are also real, the crown is on the left side: https://www.fratellowatches.com/help-my-son-is-a-lefty-a-loo...
(Personally I'm ambidextrous enough to never have felt the need for one.)
A left-handed watch has the crown on the left side of the watch head, it’s meant to be worn by a left-handed person on their right wrist.
[1] Unless they are a high-end pen with a nub, rather than just a ballpoint. A pen with a nub may have left-handed or right-handed versions of the nub.
I have never understood why, though. In my mind, if you rotate the scissors 180 degrees, they should become the other kind (assuming the handles are symmetric, not those ergonomic asymmetric ones, I mean). And I just don't see why not no matter how hard I think. I'm not a dumb person but I have always had a particular weakness to understand certain spatial-related things, e.g. that method to change the duvet cover where you roll it and unroll it and when you unroll it it ends up inside... for me, it might as well be magic :D
If they don't cut, it's because your fingers are pulling the blades apart instead of pushing them together.
If they just feel awkward, it's because the blade that is on "top" is obscuring your view of the cut, because the sharp edge is facing away from you.
Rotating the scissors doesn't turn them into the other kind for the same reason that rotating yourself doesn't turn you into a mirror image.
Left and Right handed versions are asymmetric mirror images of each other than cannot be rotated to match.
Consider:
* Smaller top loop for thumb.
* Larger bottom loop for fingers.
* Loops have width and are bevelled; wider where the thumb first enters, narrower on the side the thumb comes out, these are shaped for comfort and control.
* The action of moving a thumb and fingers "up and down" has a slight twisting action to it that is factored into how the anvil and cutting blades of the scissors are arranged so that the left twist causes the blades to run tight against each other when left handed and mirrored for the right twist of the right hand.
Here's my understanding of why this is. When holding the scissors with your hands, in addition to the up-and-down force you exert on the blade with your fingers, you also exert a small side-to-side force with your fingers. With my right handed scissors in my right hand, this force pushes to the outside on the upper handle and to the inside on the lower handle. This force also makes the scissors feel more comfortable.
On the other side of the fulcrum, though, the upper handle controls the lower blade and the lower handle controls the upper blade. Here, the lateral forces end up drawing the blades closer together, giving a tighter pair of edges between which shearing forces are applied. This makes the cutting action more effective than if lateral forces were absent.
In my left hand, the (outside at the top and inside at the bottom) lateral forces end up pushing the blades further apart on the other side of the fulcrum. This reduces the shear force and makes the cutting action less effective.
To compensate for this while operating the scissors with your left hand, you would need to adopt a weird style: Consciously pull to the inside with your thumb, and to the outside with your remaining fingers. You'll notice that the scissors are now much more effective than before. It is also a deeply uncomfortable grip.
The issue is that scissors are (surprisingly) chiral sculptures. In the case of regular right-handed scissors, when viewed edge down, the handle closer to the viewer passes through the left of the fulcrum. I have never used a pair of left-handed scissors, but I would presume that for them, the closer handle passes through the right side of the fulcrum.
Curious - was your mom a lefty ? (mine was)
All later skills, like shooting a bow, I do as a right-handed, since I am right-eyed. This is hard to do, since my left arm is much stronger than my right and you need more strength in the string-pulling arm.
I feel wrong and awkward a lot. Writing on a keyboard is very liberating. But when I was playing first person shooters in my teenage years, my aim (right-hand mouse) was always bad, while my footwork (left-hand WASD) was very good :D
Dominant eye and hand don't have to match; in fact, they often don't. To quote Wikipedia:
> ...the side of the dominant eye and the dominant hand do not always match. This is because both hemispheres control both eyes, but each one takes charge of a different half of the field of vision, and therefore a different half of both retinas
Write, eat, brush teeth, scissors, chop vegetables, etc. Basically fine motor skills on the left.
Right:
Throw a baseball, shoot a basketball, play tennis, etc. Power movements on the right.
Could always do some sports lefty, like switch hit in baseball, kick a football (soccer) past half field, or play pool, those kinds of things, but right side has always been stronger.
The only sport where I am much better lefty than righty is table tennis -- probably because to play at higher levels you need fine motor skills, not just brute force.
I cannot imagine trying to throw a baseball with my left hand, but maybe I should do it anyway.
With a bit of practise I can write neatly with my left but it's a bit slower. I started using a computer mouse with my left hand so that I could put a notepad just to the right of the keyboard and not compete for space with the mouse.
I lived in Europe for 10 years and that was nice as far as eating goes. Here in the USA I always try to grab a left corner so I'm not bumping elbows with anyone.
I had an uncle just like us, my son is a true full on lefty.