I write (horrible handwriting), eat and mouse Lefty. I can throw, bowl, bat, kick, scissor, cut, chop with both but Righty tends to be better than Lefty in most cases. It took years for me to realize this. I used to think I throw Righty because there were no hand me down right handed baseball gloves in the family. I have started to wonder if my Lefty mother encouraged me to use my left hand. All my brothers were Rightys and she was very proud of me being left handed. My mother resisted Depression era Catholic nuns efforts to convert her to a Righty.
Pretty much anything I was taught to do (write, throw, use knife & fork, etc.) I do right-handed since that’s the way I was taught. The things I just picked up on my own I do left handed. I am definitely left eye dominant, so shooting any sort of firearm is done left-handedly.
Fun story from music class in 3rd or 4th grade - we were being taught to play the ukelele and I was mimicking what I saw the teacher doing, but it sounded just awful. After some close observation by the teacher, she figured out that I was trying to play a right-handed instrument left-handed and thus had the order of strings upside down. And while Jimi Hendricks was quite adept at playing guitar that way, I never did manage to make it work.
I had a friend in a junior college fencing class who broke his right hand days before the course started. He was SO excited to be forced to go Westley/ Man in Black and learn lefty. It was harder and more awkward than he anticipated, but he still dominated the newer fencers (not me).
Sabre?
Just foil.
Huh. I knew it’s a notable difference in sabre — from the swings — but didn’t know it was a big deal in pointy thrusting. Thanks!
I took a semester of fencing in college, and we only learned and fought foil. A friend of mine was also in the class, and he was left-handed. The coach said exactly that: lefties have a bit of an advantage against other fencers, largely because fencers are more accustomed to how another righty fights; the mirror-image attacks and defenses by a lefty fencer take some getting used to, as it’s not seen often.
I would surmise that’s true for all combat sports. It’s true enough in boxing that promising young southpaw boxers used to be encouraged to switch or else they might not get booked for as many fights just because of the problem they present to their opponents (who are similarly trying to claw their way up the ladder).
You left out the choice of
[√ ] Nonbidextrous - the ability to nothing with both hands AT THE SAME TIME.
I’ve even heard lefties say they have trouble with other lefties because they’re just so used to fighting with both weapons on the same side.