When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood… Source
When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood…
Source
Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operating machinery. That aside, overall, I enjoy being left-handed. It grants entry into a smug little club, whose members — 10% of the human population — carry the secret knowledge that we are overrepresented among U.S. presidents, famous artists and musicians, and top athletes.
But our difference hasn’t always been welcome. My 91-year-old Texan grandmother remembers starting out left-handed (she, too, has examples of mirror-writing from early childhood) before being forced to switch, a common practice in much of the world until about the 1970s. The deep-seated disdain for left hands runs through our very language. “Left” comes from Old English lyft , meaning weak, foolish, worthless, or useless, while “right” means correct or proper. In other languages, the word for “left” can also mean awkward, unlucky, clumsy, suspicious, or sinister.
In college, I decided to spend a semester in Ghana, unaware that left-handedness is still stigmatized across much of Africa. Upon arrival, I kept accidentally offending people by eating or paying with my left hand, because, traditionally, the left is reserved for dirty tasks and the right for social interactions. When my Twi language instructor, Professor Kofi Agyekum , demonstrated how ceremonial robes are draped around the left shoulder and arm, leaving a chief’s right arm bare and free, I asked what happens if the chief is left-handed. “Oh no, no, we don’t go in for that,” he said.
Fortunately, our brains are plastic. My grandma developed beautiful handwriting as a right-hander. I easily changed my habits in Ghana. And as a kid I learned to use scissors right-handed. Today, given a choice, I don’t think I’d be able to cut with my left.
That we can fully retrain our hands (and brains) reinforces how little it matters which hand naturally dominates. And that’s part of what makes the circumstance so mysterious. If it makes no material difference, then why am I left-handed? Or perhaps more pertinently: Why are 90% of people right-handed?
