Hmpf…lightweight.
It depends on whether I’m on automatic or not. My right hand is the automatic hand I will offer, and I think it’s awkward to put it back down after it’s already started. But, if I catch it in time, I’ll probably use my left hand.
Unless, of course, I’m doing that friendly awkwardness thing, where you make a joke about it. But that obviously only applies in really casual situations.
Since several of my relatives have no right arm, I grew up shaking either the right or the left hand depending on which one was offered.
If I am offered the left hand, I shake with my left hand. Yes, I will switch stuff from my left hand to my right hand to do this. No problems. I do not even notice when I do this, as my wife has observed & commented on many times.
Hereditary Agenesis, family owned sawmill, or pure coincidence?
/awkward curiousity
It is a little late to reply to this, but since I was asked: Two were combat related, one a logging accident, one a farming accident, and one a cowhand trying to get one more loop on the saddle horn just as the bull hit the end if the lariat. All but the combat ones were on family run operations.They have all passed on now.
5 years later, wow, that’s some classy responding. Good on you. I’d shake your left foot if we were in the same hammock.
Boy Scouts. I can only assume that BSA didn’t follow Baden Powell and the international Scouts in this custom.
In this little gem from Autumn of 2017, Cecil’s column included…
We note that in many places where there’s little distance between the food and the fingers, other cultural practices have, of necessity, coevolved: namely, the convention that the right hand is for eating and the left hand is for … other business. (As the prophet Muhammad put it, “The devil eats and drinks with his left hand.”)
…and since it seems a couple responders need it explained more blatantly, that “other business” left unmentioned is the less-than-thrilling-yet-ever-so-necessary act of cleaning one’s excretory orifices after using a latrine/outhouse/restroom/cat-hole/whatever-euphemism-you-need-here.
Since I’m saying what is usually considered “needless to say” I’ll spell out that cleaning yourself after excreting renders your cleaning hand foul-smelling and, long before the world accepted those newfangled notions about the relationship between germs and filth and disease, cultures around the world understood well enough that passing excrement to the mouth – even indirectly through food or other means – strongly correlated with disease. Therefore, cultures around the world adopted similar norms of using the left hand for that foul (but necessary) function and using the right hand for – well, everything else – to the point that the left hand was considered evil, left-handers were poorly regarded (at best), and most customs and mechanical inventions were geared toward right-hand usage. As an aside, it was quite intentional that, in societies with repressive systems of law (c.f Mechanical Solidarity), various offenses were punished by the removal of one’s fingers or the entire hand – the right hand. This was intended to compound the punishment of losing the hand with the disease brought on by having to eat and drink with the left (soiled) hand.
Lest any readers dismiss such cultures as ancient bygones,
- I’m normally a left-hander but my mother retrained me in using chopsticks with the right hand, weeks before I headed off to teach English in a semi-rural part of Japan. That was 1995 and she worried that there might still be parts of Japan where eating with the left hand was forbidden.
- My father-in-law loves telling that one story about his experiences as a missionary in Nepal; how every outhouse has a bucket of water on the left side – that everyone shares. He was stationed in Nepal in 1998. [He would invariably reminisce about that after we had adjourned from the banquet table, until we started interrupting him as soon as “I remember in Nepal…” came out of his mouth.
- In the summer of 2019 after an office party at an Indian restaurant, some of my coworkers were complaining about seeing some guests at another table eating with their fingers. I looked to my Indian coworker and asked if those guests had been eating with their left or right hands. He turned pale and quickly answered, “OH, their right hands, of course!” and while I shrugged and said the matter wasn’t a big deal, the response also told me that the right-hand dominant norm was still very powerful to Indians.
So, to put it very bluntly: There are still societies and cultures – yes, even modern cultures – which associate the left hand with wiping the ass and consider it taboo to touch things with the left hand. And, to people raised in such cultures, extending the left hand for someone to grasp would be socially outrageous, if not insulting.
Clear enough?
–G!
This thread is obviously a few years old, so was asked when the world was very different, but I’m really hopeful that the pandemic has gotten rid of shaking hands altogether.