My son bats left-handed but is a righty in all other ways. He played left wing in hockey before he ever played baseball and I always assumed that’s why.
I am looking at two mice–one Logitech and one Microsoft–and they are both symmetric. I’ve seen mice that aren’t, but certainly not all Logitech mice.
I’m a 62 yr old leftie who, outside of writing, is sort of hybrid ambidextrous.
Any swing sports such as golf, hockey, baseball etc I do as a righties, I can throw with either, and I play guitar right handed.
On my first day on a small arms range in the military I held my rifle as a leftie but the instructor suggested I try it right handed and it was a completely non-awkward, and permanent, switch.
I’m also fairly good at drawing. I never, ever experienced any pressure whatsoever to switch hands for writing.
I’ve been an instructional systems designer since '97, and a lot of us are left handed; I was once in a conference room with five or six ISDs, all of whom were left handed.
I heard the following can be used to determine which of your eyes is dominant. Hold your hands out from your body (arms fully extended). Touch your index fingers and thumbs together so the gap between your hands forms an upside-down kite shape. In that opening, “frame” something across the room, like a clock or plant. Close one eye. Is the object still there? Close the other; did it disappear?
I suck with my left hand typically, but I can do the chopsticks, I discovered, a few weeks ago when trying to teach my 7-year-old, a leftie, how to do it. Other daughter is a rightie, as is everyone in my close family.
Honestly, it’s always seemed to me that left handed and right handed guitar is backwards. At least, for the type of stuff I normally see people play. (Maybe the intricate finger work of finger picking is better in your dominant hand, but it seems to me that, with strumming, it is the chording hand that is far more intricate.
That said, this comes from someone who knows a few chords on guitar but can’t really play. Maybe I would feel differently if I would ever get good enough. But man, trying to get my left hand to do those chord shapes and change them quickly is so hard.
I’m left-handed. I adapted to the pencil smearing issue by typing everything as soon as possible. And like you, I became ambidextrous with things like scissors and mice. Also, forks and chopsticks.
I’m not a particularly tribal person but for some reason I find myself having a certain affinity for fellow lefties. Any idiot can be right handed. But lefties seem to be overrepresented among the most capable and productive people in society, like Nobel Prize winners. And we were abused in the past, so I’m not going to feel bad for things like earning more money than righties. Or wiping my ass with my right hand.
Maybe it’s due to the fact that you need to be a bit more precise with the right hand? Not all guitar chords allow you to play all 6 strings, simply because no human could possibly have the finger shape to fret the notes of the chords as required due to a paucity of digits and how they are connected. From the diagrams I’ve seen, it’s the first and/or last string(s), not ones in the middle, which makes it possible to play in one strum, but it does mean you need to pay attention to exactly which strings you start and/or end on or else you’ll get something that sounds a bit different than intended. Most fretting done with the left hand is imprecise - you just need to be between the two frets.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m cross-dominant. I do most things right-handed, some things left-handed. I write with my right-hand, mouse with my left, so I can be working on the computer with my left hand and making notes with my right hand.
I also proof-read with both hands. Today i was proof-reading an article, with a foul copy with corrections marked up in red, and a clean copy. I had the marked up foul copy in front of me on my desk to the left, with a blue pen in my left hand. The clean copy was In front of me to the right, with a red pen in my right hand.
I flipped through the pages of both copies, comparing the two. If a correction had been properly made to the good copy, I crossed the edit off on the foul copy in blue with my left hand, to show it had been made. If a correction hadn’t been made to the good copy, I added it to the good copy in red with my right hand.
Once I’d gone through the entire article, I used the new marked up red copy to make corrections on the computer version, print out new fair copy, and repeat.
I’ve never understood where all the throws-righty, bats-lefty MLB players come from. I played organized baseball from age 5 to 17 and don’t think I saw that once.
I’m a lefty, and the only one in my immediate family. My aunt though was a natural lefty forced to change, and my grandmother on the other side was very good at mirror writing, which I understand is typically a left-handed talent. I wouldn’t compare her to da Vinci, but she did paint better than I could. I always regarded myself as artistically inclined, but after this many years of my life, such claims are expected to be backed up with evidence, which lacks.
I never was pressured to change handedness, but my fourth-grade teacher did try to get me to grip the pen like a righty. I think my grip is pretty typical for a lefty; thumb on one side and the other three non-pinky fingers on the other. My ring finger does most of the work of countering the thumb; the other two as much as anything are there for lack of any better place to go. Also, if the point of the pen presses on the center of the clock dial, the plug end points to about 10:45. The far right of my left palm, under the pinky, does tend to get a bit inky when I write. Don’t know if this is related, but I write most numbers or letters from the bottom up. Of the digits, 6 is the only one that starts at the top, while C, U, V, and W are the only capitals.
I always used righty scissors because lefty scissors didn’t cut. Plus those ugly green handles. They were the lefty’s version of girls’ gym outfits. I read somewhere much later that I was supposed to reverse the action of a right-handed scissor, so maybe that was why. Anyway, I’d generally use my left hand to work the righty scissors and it didn’t seem too difficult. I also early got used to computer mouses being right-handed but it could be that I simply didn’t know how to change the orientation. In any case, on a shared computer it would not have seemed worth the trouble.
There are probably a good number of other handicaps that would piss me off if I were aware, but one I did notice and found outrageous was the utter absence of lefty writing desks from any school I ever attended.
Not quite a postscript but I just did that eye test that lobo mentions and my right eye won. Also if I were ever called on to kick a field goal, I’d use my right leg.
Right handed scissors are not just slanted where your fingers go into them. They are also designed so that pushing your thumb to the left while pulling your fingers in the other hole to the right makes the blades crisscross slightly so that they cut better.
I have been handed “left handed scissors” that had the finger hole contours redesigned for the left hand but they didn’t bother to reverse the damn blades! So if you tried to cut using your left hand in the way that feels natura, pushing your thumb to the left and your fingers to the right, the blades splay APART and don’t cut worth shit!
I learned to cut with the regular right-handed scissors. I’m good at it as long as I don’t have to do it for very long.
I sew ambidextrously, switching the needle from one hand to the other.
Left handed person here - I solved the smudged writing problem by turning the page 90 degrees and writing up and down rather than across. I don’t recall when I first did this, but it was sometime in grade school. I can’t write the normal way now. In my family 1 of my 3 kids and 1 of 2 grandkids are left handed.
I work at a veterinary hospital, and at 1 time all four internal medicine clinicians were left handed while all 4 surgeons were right handed. As a specialty, medicine folks have to do more association and inference while surgeons can be dogmatic.
This is a somewhat timely thread. My left-handed mouse just stopped working yesterday and it seems the model is long out of production. I might settle for a decent ambidextrous mouse or switch to mousing with my right hand.
I haven’t really had any negative or even novel experiences being left-handed. I do recall in 3rd grade that our teacher was going around teaching us penmanship, using examples from a book she had. She instructed me to follow the picture in the book but as I looked closely I saw that it was just a right-handed person with the image flipped around; the letters on his page were backwards!
I remember struggling to start the lawnmower. I’d hold the starting bar with my right hand then reach under my arm with my left hand. As I got further into my teen years I was finally strong enough to use my right hand.
I’m so used to cutting with right-handed scissors (pulling back on the thumb) that I’m not sure I’d do well with left-handed scissors.
Had a friend in school who kicked with his left foot. Now that was unusual to me.
Born in the late fifties. Same – I was naturally left-handed, but was taught to write with my right hand (although there was no tying of anything – I just did what the nuns told me to do). I have no idea if left-handedness is hereditary, but my father was left-handed, taught to write right-handed.
I play musical instruments (badly, but I don’t think that has anything to do with handedness) right-handed. As a kid, I played sports left-handed. I’m only comfortable with my watch on my right wrist, like a lefty.
It’s all worked out just fine – I don’t think I’ve suffered any ill effects.
Oh, and two of my three children are right-handed. The youngest, we’re not sure yet.
I totally get this.
That’s true of a guitar, sure, but violinists and violists and bassists stop the strings with their non-dominant hands, and those instruments don’t have frets, so precision is required… I myself play the fretless electric bass, but I guess I’m not a typical case (also, I really don’t have much in the way of musical talent).
My parents were left-handed, and I am left-handed. My brother’s right-handed. Apparently statistically less than half of two left-handed people’s children are also lefties, so your kids being both lefties is an outlier like my brother and I both being redheads like our mom instead of brunet/te like our dad whose hair was such a dark brown I thought it was black when I was little.
I’m left-handed. I’m fairly ambidextrous, I assume partly by natural ability, and partly by just having to do certain things right-handed.
I use right-handed scissors in either hand. Lefty scissors throw me off – I wind up squeezing them like I do righty ones, and then they don’t work.
I can write tolerably well with my right just because I found it amusing to practice. The side of my left hand gets graphite or in on it when I write.
I sometimes point out that even pencils are right-handed. (˙uʍop ǝpᴉsdn sᴉ ƃuᴉʇᴉɹʍ ǝɥʇ)
I’m pretty artistic. I was told the “right brain” business when I was a kid.
I do archery right-handed, because I’m right eyed. I do ukulele right handed because I tried both ways, and a finger injury made chording with my right painful, and it seemed simpler to learn righty if I thought I could.
Alright, good to hear from some fellow lefties!
Yeah, I’ve thought that too— it seems like fretting and playing lead riffs would be best done with the dominant hand. But then, I’m more of a simple campfire-style strum and sing player, though I do attempt fingerpicking or more complicated picking with a guitar pick for certain songs. Also the strumming / picking hand controls the rhythm, so I guess with complicated pick patterns and rhythms it would benefit from the dominant hand.
Ha, my kids are also outliers in that my hair is (well, used to be) also so dark brown that people called it black, I married a redhead, and both of our kids were born bright copper colored redheads (one still has the same hair color, the other’s turned a dirty reddish blond after age two).
But I have a lot of Scottish in me so I’m sure I carry the red hair gene.
AIUI that’s not what cross-dominate means.
Do this,
If your favored hand and eye aren’t on the same side then you are cross-dominant.
CMC, left handed, right eyed, and who really should get a set of right handed golf clubs if I ever start playing again 'cause all that bat and axe swinging really hurt my ability to swing a club without the face opening way, way, up.
I’m also left-handed, as was my mother. My second grade teacher kept putting the pencil in my right hand when we were learning cursive, apparently convinced that my handwriting would be better. It was not, and my left-handed writing was actually not bad at all. She gave me bad writing grades all year despite that, though. She was an ignorant woman in other respects as well.
I’ve been on a life-long quest to find pens that don’t smear. I’ve only found a few, and of course the company then stops making them.
I taught myself to use right-handed scissors because the left-handed kind suck so much. And I use a right-handed mouse. When cooking, the chef’s knife goes in the left hand, but at the dinner table the knife goes in the right. I only had to smack elbows once with a dining companion to change my ways there!
I’m following the defintiion from the wikipedia article: