When I was a kid, I bonked elbows with someone who was sitting next to me since he was cutting his food right-handed and I was doing the same left-handed. This experience was unpleasant enough that I taught myself to use my right hand to cut food at the table and do that to this day. Fork stays in the left hand. When I am cooking and prepping ingredients, though, I still use the knife left-handed.
I also decided in 2nd grade that left-handed scissors suck, so I use scissors right-handed too. X-Acto knife goes in the left hand, though.
I don’t know if I could teach myself to do something differently at my age now - I was a kid then, when doing new/different stuff comes much easier, plus I wasn’t thinking it would be hard, so I wasn’t mentally blocking myself either.
What is this thing with “eating lefthanded” anyway? I can use a fork or cut things equally well with either hand although in general, if I’m eating something that doesn’t have to be cut (or can be cut easily with a fork–like a pancake) I use my right hand, but if I’m eating steak, I have the fork in my left hand and the knife in my right. But I can use a knife with my right hand.
Also, scissors? I know that if you buy expensive big-deal scissors they have a little tail on them, but my scissors are ordinary, and when I use scissors the most, for instance cutting out patterns, there is always part of the pattern that’s easier to cut if you come at it left-handed, and I do that using the same scissors. It has not caused a problem. (I’m probably doing it wrong, because my hands get really tired, either way.)
I can also probably beat you at ping-pong using either hand. If I played ping-pong with Serena Williams, though, I’d use my right hand.
Tennis, right hand. Polo, right hand because it has to be.
Most brass instruments (well, all that I can think of) are right-handed. I played trombone starting in 4th grade but I never struggled too much. Not that trombone requires a tremendous amount of manual dexterity (hold bar. extend arm.)
This is making me think of all the right-handed bullshit I’ve had to deal with over the years. Spiral bound notebooks to poke at my tender flesh. Getting ink on my precious hand from it smearing across the page. Scissors. The scissors alone! I also used to do archery. Finding left-handed bows was always a chore.
We had a ton of left-handed people in social work school. They seemed to be overrepresented there. I dunno what that means. I also have a lot of left-handed friends.
On a guitar, one hand does one thing and the other hand does something else. On a piano, both hands do the same things.
And there are left-handed guitars and people who play guitars upside down (Grandma Anderson, who taught herself on her brother’s guitar for instance. I don’t know whether she was left-handed.)
Most brass instruments have the keys played by the right hand, true. But there are only three keys. The rest is done with ear and breath. I think the French horn keys might be on the left. (Also, I think some of them have four keys, but still, that’s only four keys.) And you have to hold up the instrument with your other hand, so right-handed players are holding it up with their non-dominant hand.
Yeah but if you watch the video the guy explains why he prefers the left handed piano better. Maybe his reasoning is faulty but I wouldn’t rule out that maybe he is on to something.
Even guitar is kind of odd if you think about it, I play the bass but I consider myself something of a virtuoso. You would tend to think that your dominant hand to be the one more capable of performing complex intricate movements, but not really so on a guitar.
Your dominant hand is the one that is essentially the workhorse performing more simple strumming and such it doesn’t really have to move around all that much, your non-dominant hand is the one moving all around the fretboard forming all sorts of different patterns and holding down multiple frets, performing all sorts of gymnastic feats of dexterity. Intuitively you would almost think it should be the other way around, but it isn’t. At the same time I feel like you have to be at least somewhat ambidextrous in the first place to play a stringed instrument, especially when doing things like two- hand tapping.
Thinking about guitar playing a little bit more thought I’d add why I think the dominant hand is used for strumming, picking,or slapping on a bass, etc. I think maybe the reason is because you don’t really have to think about what your right (dominant) hand is doing.
When I’m playing bass or someone is playing guitar the right hand sort of goes on autopilot where I don’t have to “think” about coordinating the movement in my right hand and I tend to actively focus more on the fretting hand especially if you are playing something very complex it “frees” up my brain so to speak to focus on what the left hand is doing and make it’s movements more precise. If I was playing a left handed guitar and I wasn’t left handed even though it would have to do less overall I don’t think I could let the left hand sort of go on autopilot like the way I was describing and then I wouldn’t be able to properly coordinate both my hands as well. I hope I explained all that well enough that it’s understandable.
I don’t know when did you try it, but I’ve been sort’a practicing archery for 7 years and leftie bows have always been easily available. Also, for archery what counts is eye dominance, not hand (at least according to the professional instructors I’ve had; I figure they know better than the nice guy from the uni’s archery club).
So it seemed to me, but could it be that we were trying to use the lefty scissors just as we’d use right-handed, instead of reversing it somehow, because it was too late to learn or no one ever explained? Or is it that left-handed scissors in fact simply don’t cut, because lefties are so clumsy they’d hurt themselves.
I didn’t like the fact that they were covered in that green plastic. It’s to distinguish them of course, but then give the righties their own plastic to deal with.
To me, the most annoying school-related injustice was that every single desk in the school was the right-handed type. They couldn’t order a few left-handed desks?
Turning a Spanish acoustic lefty is a matter of flipping the strings. Turning a piano lefty, you need to flip the whole structure. It’s a bit more complicated.
I’ve never had issues with using scissors. Not sure what the problem is as I never experienced it. I actually disliked those lefty safety scissors when I was a little kid. Now my script is terrible and the side of my hand used to pick up the ink. That is my only real issue with being a lefty.
I managed to find both a recurve and a compound but they weren’t in wide supply. The compound IIRC was the only one available at the store (this would have been the 90s) and the recurve we found at a coon dog event in another state. (Think something like a gun show.)
Yes indeedy, I do have some very redneck roots.
I kinda miss archery and have considered taking it up again. With the internet I’d probably have better luck finding a bow, but I’d have to figure out the weight all over again.
As for eye-dominance, I know I would not shoot as well with a right-handed bow. But I am left-eye dominant and it makes way more sense to me to look down an arrow with that eye while holding a left-handed bow.
I had what I thought a funny story. I taught myself left-handed 10-key because I am right-handed, so it saved me constantly having to switch between the pencil and the calculator. Then I got a job doing inventory, using these big calculators that we hung over our shoulders or belted to a hip. Naturally, I did it left-handed, because I never got the proper training. One day I overheard a couple of other people complaining that they were southpaws stuck using right-handed calculators, while here I am a right-handed person using the same calculator comfortably with my left hand.
Some things I can do left handed, but not if there is any precision involved. It seems like there is some sort of trainability factor that varies between people.