The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015)

washingtonpost.com

50 pointsroktonos51 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20250420182951/https://www.washin...

The areas with higher rates of left handedness on the map seem to correlate to the more progressive areas where you’d expect parents and teachers to not discourage it. Was kind of surprised they didn’t mention that, given they started with that anecdote.

Or in other words, educators in red states are more effective in suppressing sinister tendencies in children.

To the people downvoting labster's comment: He's making a joke about left-handedness being referred to as "sinister" due to the Latin origins (apparently this may originate from how Romans wore their togas). He's not saying that teachers are making children any less evil.

Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right.

Yeah, if you think about it, this is a "discrimination" deeply enbedded in pretty much every language - or at least languages with European roots, not sure about others: "right" always has positive connotations (being right, human rights, words like "dexterity" etc.) while "left" has negative ones (not as often, but often enough, like the "sinister" mentioned by the other comment).

I often wonder if it would be best for English to lose grammatical gender entirely. Encoding assumptions about gender is leading to endless debates about pronouns which other languages avoid entirely.

In Wiktionary,

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinister#Latin

it shows a few definitions of "sinister" in Latin that seem contradictory. "left", "perverse/bad", but "auspicious" for Romans, while "inauspicious" for Greeks. And a Proto-Indo-European source which is positive.

The PIE source is positive, because it was applied as a euphemism in Latin to what would have been laevus (cf. Greek λαιός), from the PIE word for "left." The Greeks, too, preferred euphemism to the direct term for "left": the much more common term ἀριστερά ("left") is a constrastive/comparative derived from ἄριστος, "best," so it means the "bester side."

Noa-names, a precaution against things like accidentally summoning a bear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name

Interesting. I knew Spanish izquierda (left) came from Basque, but I didn't realize it was to avoid a taboo word like sinister.

These are euphemisms to avoid another euphemism, as the other poster says, sinister itself starting out as positive. The ancient euphemism treadmill.

Yeah, the side of the political spectrum associated with the color red in the US (which is actually used for the other side in pretty much all of the rest of the world AFAIK) is usually referred to as "right-wing", so they of course think that nothing having to do with left can be good...

My brother is left-handed, but he was forced to write right-handed at school. He was smacked hard on his hand with a ruler if he was caught using his left hand.

The archive.org link doesn't seem to have captured TFA.

https://archive.ph/y543P

Maybe the html caption under the image broke their parser

Thank you! I was wondering why a one-paragraph story was posted here with the real content in two links you'd have to follow. Your version has some actual content.

archive.ph always gives me a "welcome to ngix" page, isp specific?

Weird, because http://web.archive.org/web/20250420182951/https://www.washin... shows the full text for me; that's why I added it to the top yesterday.

I'll belatedly put your link up there too. Thanks!

Quote from the article

One of the best available data sets on left-handedness comes from a scratch-and-sniff survey of olfactory ability mailed out to millions of National Geographic subscribers in the 1980s.

Go ahead and read that sentence again — it doesn't get any less weird the second time around.

I do recall preferring the left hand on my first day with a pencil. However, during that first day, I remember being able to switch to use my right hand as well and it started to feel more comfortable after a very short time. The tipping point was the frustration of using my right hand and failing to be able to control it correctly. I swapped to my (then-worse) left hand and was willing to deal with the frustration better. By the second day, my right hand was too alien and I only switched back briefly in my early 30s due to injuring my left arm/hand, where I basically had pre-school level right-hand cursive.

As far as I know, I'm the only left hander in my extended family.

Why is it that right-handed people play stringed instruments such that the strings are actuated with the right hand (finger picking, flatpicking, strumming, bowing), and fingered with the left? Many left handed players reverse the arrangement.

On the other hand (pun inteneded) left-handed pianos are almost unheard of.

Clearly it's to stop right-handed players from 'cheating' their way through Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

String actuation requires much finer and varied motor skills than simply pressing down on the string. There's many strengths and directions in how a string can be plucked or bowed or strummed and it changes how it sounds, but pressing down on the string is pretty on/off binary.

yeah i am left handed but learned to play a right handed guitar and I have often wished i had done it differently - maybe one of these days i'll pick up a lefty guitar and learn all over again

same, I actually switched hands for a bit out of curiousity but didn't restring. mainly used to buy used guitars, pawn shop specials so finding a specifically right hand guitar would probably be more difficult, plus I liked the idea of being able to play a guitar that wasn't mine. I didn't do too much tho, as I'm not that good a right handed player either hehe

> Many left handed players reverse the arrangement.

This is untrue and actually uncommon. Not every instrument is a guitar. Left handed cello players don't string their instrument upside-down. They play it right handed.

To dispel some apparent ignorance, both left and right hand dexterity is important for playing fretted string instruments, such as the guitar.

On the guitar, the left hand is doing a lot more than just pressing on strings: chords, slides, bends, tapping as in hammer-ons/pull-offs, natural harmonics, even muting strings in some techniques (see Stevie Ray Vaughan’s style).

The right hand is also doing more than just strumming or picking: two-handed tapping, artificial harmonics, palm muting, using the whammy bar to produce vibrato or whole-chord bends.

There are also techniques like sweep picking which require very precise coordination between both hands.

Same goes for fretless string instruments: playing long notes by drawing the bow over the strings (legato) is the bread and butter of bowed instruments like the violin and the cello, but they can also be played with short stabs of the bow (staccato) or by picking the strings with the fingers of the right hand (pizzicato), among others. Vibrato and slides are played using the left hand, simply by moving the finger up and down the string.

Exactly; both hands have a complex job to do requiring dexterity and timing. Hence the question.

According to the internet several left-handed guitar players play normal (right-handed) guitars normal way. For the "why", I don't think there is anything particularly interesting here; several left-handed people tend to use asymmetric items that are made for right-handed people.

Did you perhaps want a word other than "several"?

Several is commonly understood to be a single digit figure, above 1, but well below 9.

The habits or preferences of "several" people in the entire world don't mean anything.

("Several percent", and you've got something).

Yes, I was unaware of that. Thank you for pointing it out

My parents "retrained" me to be right-handed. All primary-school things like writing, using scissors, etc. I do right-handed. For the rest? All I am is confused - some things I do right-handed, others left-handed. FWIW I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid, which...may be related?

I too am mixed regarding doing things with different hands - for finer movements (writing, holding a spoon) I prefer using the left hand, while for stronger movements (punching, throwing a ball) I prefer using the right hand. Not sure why though, I never underwent any "retraining".

I'm a leftie and that the same for me. I've think it's because the world is designed for righthanded people so we get retrained even if don't realize it.

Plenty of us righties out there like this. I write, catch, throw, kick etc. as a right hander, but surf, play the drums, jump etc. like a left hander. When I learned to box as a teenager I settled for orthodox, but it could have gone either way. Never had a problem with coordination.

I think it's genetic, and probably a spectrum. My mom's family has a few lefties, and a number of righties that play traditionally left handed positions in team sports.

Same for me, but in the opposite direction. I had a revelation a few years ago that this is probably why I mix up left and right more than what seems like normal.

I do many things in what is considered the right-handed way, but others the left way. I do a bit or martial arts (badly, but I enjoy it) and there are some things that work better for me the left-handed way there too. For a few things I'm just as good with either hand.

I think I was destined to be ambidextrous (well, ambiUNdextrous!) as I used to write the left side of the page with my left and switch over, and you'd be hard-pressed to spot where the change had happened. If teachers encouraged me to pick a side, the quality of my writing dropped on the other side of the page. I only started to favour the right when my eyes started going “properly funny” (I have a couple of faults there which interact in interesting ways) which meant to be comfortable I tended to turn what I was writing on clockwise (which made writing with the left much less comfortable/practical).

> I was a very awkward and uncoordinated kid

Same. And no different as an adult! (even worse now I get recurring vertigo…)

In my case I think it is largely due to my eyes though: my assumption being that because the faults with them changed a lot at the same time I was developing & growing generally, my body/brain were a bit hindered wrt working out the hand-eye coordination and general proprioception businesses.

One interesting note is that mix-handedness is more common than you might think, and it can confer an advantage in some sports and other areas just as full ambidextrousness can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance

Which is your dominant eye? I'm right-handed (confirmed by the semester I broke my right wrist in college), but pretty strongly left-eye dominant. I do everything right-handed except shoot a gun (and presumably a bow, if I were to do so). I had no idea of this until the first time I picked up a rifle in my teens.

I could see (pun intended) feeling at loose ends trying to do eye driven tasks opposite handed, especially if you are naturally left-handed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Handedness_Inventory

Some online tests:

* Long form: https://www.brainmapping.org/shared/Edinburgh.php

* Short form: https://www.psytoolkit.org/survey-library/handedness-ehi.htm...

founder effect, or bias of kindergarten teachers in that area having an outsized effect picking ambidextrous students to be left handed.

I wonder, if lefties are evil, what does that make the ambidextrous? What of those who write with their feet or mouths?

The geographical weirdness: left-handedness is much more widespread in Northeast, with some less prominent peaks in Florida, Arizona, South Dakota. The source is suggested to be genetic.

I wonder if there's information on how many passengers of the Mayflower were left-handed.

> I wonder if there's information on how many passengers of the Mayflower were left-handed.

Probably 0% reported, considering the negative views towards left-handedness at the time.

My son is left handed. Nobody else in my or my wife’s family is or has been left handed, that we know of. And we don’t live in one of the mentioned areas. It seems odd, but I’ve never looked into it.

I’m the same. No one in my family tree going back to my great grandparents were lefties. Nor any cousins or 2nd cousins. Just me.

Me and my sister are left-handed, but nobody else in our family. And suddenly not one but two kids? (We're not twins.)

That is… bizarre indeed.

After the resurgence of homophobia, racism, antivax, misogyny, I've been wondering if we're undoing the last couple of centuries of civilization. I never expected the next step to be left-handedness becoming associated with evil again.

history sort of rhymes but its because even in the past, we are still merely humans. I suspect there's no resurgence of these "philosophies", they were probably always there but hidden to whatever degree appropriate to the state of the current things.

I definitely agree tho, in my youth I thought science and rational thought would be spread by enhanced worldwide communications but should have known all that would be spread was the natural and inevitable state of human degeneracy.

> they were probably always there but hidden

That's what I meant by resurgence. They were never gone, but less dominant, losing in influence. And now they're, one by one, being forced back into our faces again, undoing much of the progress we seemed to have made.

> I thought science and rational thought would be spread by enhanced worldwide communications

Yeah, we'd have so much information at our fingertips. Surely that would usher in a new era of democratization and enlightenment. Turns out it made lies spread a lot faster than truth.

good

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