In reply to the original question, a couple of the older members in my family went to school at a time when the schools would try to force them to become right-handed. Although they learned to use both hands, to a greater or lesser degree, they have told me that it undermined their self-confidence.
Pesonally, I write with my right hand, but mouse or use an adding machine with my left hand. That way I can have a writing pad to the right of the computer/adding machine, and write down stuff as needed, without switching hands.
I shave the left side of my face with my left hand, the right side with my right hand. I use my right hand to brush left side teeth, my left hand to brush right side teeth. I thought that was normal until university residence, when people started commmenting on it.
Mainly use my right hand to shoot pool, but switch to the left as needed - don’t like using the bridge or behind the back shots. (Plus, I discovered it’s intimidating to the other players, provided you’re reasonably accurate with the left hand.)
Thanks for doing your bit to advance the cause of human knowledge.
I was encouraged write with the right, for which I am thankful - even ball-points smudge. At cricket I bat left, but I got by fine on my right at hockey (grimace - US board, “field” hockey).
I have always kicked with my left, and have finally worked why I never kicked well at (Aussie rules) football. If you have an ambi kid this might be worth knowing. I dropped the ball with my right hand and kicked with my left foot, and as a result couldn’t get the ball to spin right.
Are there other circumstances where being ambi is a problem?
I’m definitely right handed and play guitar. Since I’m not Paul McCartney or that folkie who plays left handed on a guitar strung in the normal direction so he’s upside down as well (Bill Staines?), I play it the “normal” way: with my left used for the neck.
Why did stringed instruments in the violin and lute families generally evolve with this convention?
If a majority of people are right handed, you would have thought they would have evolved with the neck being held and the strings fingered by the usually dominant right hand, leaving the left to operate the bow or pick or pluck the strings. Yes, you are learning skills for that hand as well, but I remember first learning guitar and thinking that it would be more natural the other way around.
yabob, we covered this before. The only people who play a guitar “left-handed” are pretty much people who were not trained. You are not able to by a left-handed saxophone or flute. The proper way to play pretty much any instrument is with the left hand on the “top”. The link is in MPSIMS somewhere but I am too lazy to do the search. For the record, I have a degree in classical guitar and composition (I also play the lute, and many other instruments). I did many a research paper comparing the guitar’s traditional technique with that of other instruments. As I said earlier, if you are to play it in the traditional manner and learn from a teacher they will teach you how to play the guitar with your left hand on the fingerboard. Oh, also, self taught people tend to play backwards initially, some stick with it for their entire musical life.
Many a purist golfer, or for that matter, anyone coached by such an animal may have originally felt more at ease playing the game as a lefty, but the golf orthodoxy long held that golf is only to be played one way, -as a righty - and broke the habit at the earliest possible stage. Accordingly, the incidence of lefties in professional golf is lower than one would expect to find in a general population sample. I have no idea what are the perceived benefits of this practice, other than having a better chance of rental clubs being available. By the way, my mom is lefty(forced to change from a righty due to an injury at a young age), my father a natural righty. While I do not claim by any stretch of the imagination to be ambidexterous, some have noted that I am, how shall we say, dexterously ambiguous. It’s not that I can do any one thing equally well with both hands, but rather that I am really, really inconsistent. I lean towards right handedness(writing), but am suprised when people comment that I am left handed when doing something altogether separate. I guess this would lend support to the nuture over nature argument in respect of handedness, as genetically, both my parents were righties.