One of my new classes this semester is the history of science. One of the interesting things talked about during the class was the greek (perhaps even earlier) idea of right = good, left = bad, and also right = male, left = female. This led to theories like telling women to sleep on their right side after sex so that the sperm would run into the right side of her uterus and also to the idea that if one were to bind the left testicul of a bull just before sex, there would be more of a chance that the calf was a male.
These ideas are found, I believe, in the “Corpus Hippocraticum” and the “De Agri Culture” by Columelle (French version of name, don’t know it in English).
The professor spoke also of a Arab philosopher whose name I didn’t write down because I couldn’t read his handwriting. This philosopher said that girls with male characteristics are a result of sperm from the left testicul that runs into right “horn” of the uterus, or vice versa.
Do these ideas find their way into far Eastern Cultures as well? Is there the same right/left symbolism that existed for so long in the West?
2nd generation Asian American here, so I’m not too familiar with my culture, but in Vietnamese, the literal translation of ‘right hand’ is ‘correct hand’, and the literal translation of ‘left hand’ is ‘wrong hand’.
Other than that, I don’t know if there’s any other connotation with right being good or male in Vietnamese culture.
Wikipedia says that Mandarin Chinese has the “left=bad” connection as well, and that left-handers in China and Japan were discriminated against in various ways.
Same in India; conservative people would be quite offended if you offered or picked up anything with your left hand - for the same reason. Money with the left hand is especially taboo. I’ve offended a couple of people when I accidentally gave them money with my left hand.
My mom is Japanese and she forced me to be right-handed because being left-handed was “bad”. Although she could never really elaborate on why. It wasn’t a painful experience as far as I can remember, so it’s not like she was abusive about it or anything. Anyways, I now do everything right handed exept for writing.
Weird thing is, I’ve met two others that went through the same thing and we all now share a common affliction: none of us can quickly tell left from right. That is, if you had an apple in your right hand, it would take me longer to tell you which hand it was in than a “normal” person.
I am NOT the person you want to ask for directions.
Most Middle Eastern dishes I’ve seen are designed to be eaten with the fingers of the right hand, only; the meat is cut up in the kitchen. Cultures that don’t use knives and forks don’t have a need to use both hands at the table. That means such cultures miss out on steaks (and ribs, and corn on the cob, and any but the most dainty sandwiches), but they seem to survive.
I’m left handed/ambidextrous and always have been. When I was in the Air Force, I was made to carry a rock in my right hand when we marched so I wouldn’t end up at the opposite end of the parade ground!
I can give perfect directions, but I use North, South, East, and West, instead of left and right.
So, does that mean that it’s perfectly all right to use any hand/both hands, as required to cut up food in the kitchen, and that doesn’t count as “bad” in any way?
Until quite recently, Japanese kids were made to write and use chopsticks with their right hands. All the traditional arts, martial or creative, are taught as if you were right-handed, with no provisions for left-handed people.
A shodo teacher actually threw up her hands and refused to have anything to do with me when I participated in a group introductory lesson at a lecture when I first came to Japan. If I didn’t do it right-handed, she wouldn’t even talk to me.
The most [strike]bullshit[/strike] lame excuses I’ve been offered are from sword instructors – two kendo teachers and an iaido teacher, to date – who have told me that because I’m left-handed I have an advantage since a large part of the power in a sword strike should come from the back hand. I have somehow refrained from scornfully pointing out that if that were true, right-handed people would have switched things the other way around.
It’s a good thing that I’m not strongly left-handed and in fact am mostly ambidextrous or I wouldn’t have been able to study much in the way of martial arts. Even then, some of the more traditional teachers will actually become hostile if you try learning how to do things with either hand instead of exclusively right-handed.
If you succeed in applying your martial arts ambidexterously, Sleel, and switch to left handed in a match (or whatever a competitive fight is called), you’ll almost certainly wipe your opponent out. There’ll be protests, of course, but you can justify matters with a variation of the American jock’s favorite cliche: “I have stepped up to the prate and taken things to a higher revel.”
My understanding from various word origin references is that the “right=correct hand” “left=remaining uncorrect hand” meanings came first in English, with the use of the terms for directions arising later.
