I mouse with my right hand because back in the Stone Age of Mousing, there were no left-hand mice (mouses? meese?).
I do exactly nothing else with my right hand. I am deeply and profoundly left-handed.
Text. I’m actually better at it with my left hand, probably because I’m in the habit of keeping my right hand on my purse or messenger bag. (I’m very studenty; most of my net worth at any given time is in that bag!)
Knit. Technically this requires both hands, but I have discovered that when I’m doing something too large to comfortably turn, it’s sometimes easier to just knit backwards every other row instead.
I can’t mouse well with my left hand, but I can effectively use a laptop glide pad. I can’t use those little rubber pencil-eraser things well with either hand; I hate them.
My typing is also oddly left-hand dominant a lot of the time. I can’t use those Microsoft Natural keyboards that are split down the middle because my left hand routinely crosses over, and I wind up jabbing my index finger into the plastic divider in the middle. I touch type funny in the first place because I taught myself long before anyone had ever thought of giving us typing/computer education in school.
Left-handed stirring and whisking is useful when I’m making something where dry ingredients need to be folded slowly into the wet, because that means my stronger arm can hold the bowl/Pyrex measuring cup with all the wet stuff in it.
I’m slightly better at playing guitar in a half-ass left-handed manner. For some reason my brain wants the highest tone to be on the string farthest from the floor, so instead of properly playing a left-handed guitar I took a stab at playing a right-handed guitar upside down. It works better, but I’m still pretty crap, so it’s not really all that much of a difference.
Very right handed but have made a real effort to learn certain things with my left. Throwing is now easy, but my best is shooting pool. When you learn to use either hand it becomes amazing how many shots stop being hard to do. So far I haven’t found anything that resists being learned with the left hand, it just takes a while. It takes a little less of a while for each thing I add.
When I had my left arm in a cast I grew a beard rather than try to shave with my right.
If by left-hand mice you mean mice the buttons of which can be swapped… When I use my mouse left-handedly I still use the buttons in their normal configuration. If anything it feels more natural to hold the mouse with the left hand and ‘left-click’ with the left button.
I’m a righty. But whilst cranking on my guitar my driver side paw does all the important work.
I mouse and throw right-handed. That’s about it. I had to teach myself how to throw that way when I took up softball in grad school - couldn’t find a glove for my right hand in my godforsaken hick town. I can’t even throw a frisbee left-handed anymore.
Mousing was just…the first time I used one was at a PC with the mouse on the right side, so I just sat down and did it. I’m not sure I could do it left-handed, either.
Everything else I do left-handed.
I’m lefty. Very much so, and I don’t consider myself in any way naturally ambidextrous. However, we lefties have had to conform under you righties’ brutal oppressive yoke, and…
…sorry, where was I?
Aah yes. I can do a few things with my right hand that I have been more or less forced to do. I can dial a rotary phone (could never do it with my left), enter numerical data at speed on a touch pad, use a mouse (amazing how often I get chewed out for leaving it on the left and/or the cord isn’t long enough). I can’t do anything that involves strength and dexterity with my right hand - such as throwing an object with any accuracy.
Lefty here. Or maybe semi-dextrous. There’s a continuum of “only left” to “only right” with a lot of “either hand” in between.
But I consider my left hand dominant, and the things I can’t do with my right are write legibly and sew. OTH, I can’t use scissors with my left hand. I guess I could learn to knit/crochet left-handed, but I have no reason to.
I figured out this weekend that I shovel right-handed: right hand at the top, left hand further down the handle, and pitching the snow to the right. I do the exact opposite when raking.
Hope this isn’t a hijack, but I’ve always wondered why a righty plays guitar using the left hand for what seems like the more complex stuff and vice versa. It’s clearly not about custom as many lefty beginners know instinctively to either turn the guitar over or get a lefty guitar. Any thoughts on this?
I always wondered that myself. Initially, if you’re just strumming chords, the workload is in your non-dominant hand. But if you progress and try the intricate plucking patterns etc. your dominant hand is more important. Still, I’d like to see how bad I suck playing left-handed.
I’ve had this discussion elsewhere, and my explanation goes something like this:
I compare it to catching and throwing a baseball. A right-handed ballplayer throws with his dominant right hand, and catches with his weaker left hand. Why? Because throwing the ball is an action that requires conscious thought, while catching the ball is a reaction that occurs mostly on reflex.
Similarly, when I’m cooking in a restaurant kitchen, my right hand is manipulating the knife, the spatula, or other tool, while my left hand holds whatever I’m working on. I consciously direct my right hand, but my left hand does what I need it to do mostly on its own. Again, it’s action and reaction.
Throw a punch at somebody’s face, and I’ll bet it’s their weak hand that comes up to block it.
When I play my guitar or bass, once again it’s my right hand performing the active, conscious work — strumming or plucking the strings in a specific rhythm, strumming or plucking specific strings, varying the intensity, volume, and attack, altering the tone by plucking at different places along the string’s length, etc, etc. My left hand only has to do one thing: press the right string(s) at the right place and time. The left hand work, once I got past the initial learning stage, became almost entirely a matter of muscle memory. Want a G Major chord? My left hand fingers automatically press the correct combination of strings in the correct places - I don’t have to think about it. What I do have to think about is what my right hand is doing: am I going to simply strum the full chord, or am I going to pluck the strings individually, or do something else?
Hmmm - I just don’t know. I am a right-handed guitarist, so my left hand does tricky delicate and fast things all the time.
But I really struggle to get my left hand to do much at all when I play a piano - it becomes a lump of unresponsive fingered flesh. I really don’t think that it is dominance related at all.
And I hate XBox360 controllers that try to get you to do too much with the left thumb.
Si
I’m having a bit of a rough time right now trying to use my left hand, in the spirit of this thread, to cut bits of my apple with my pocket knife, as I always do.
The act of cutting a slice off a fruit in your hand with a knife seems innocent, but I keep feeling like I am not in control and will slice my thumb. You know the motion I’m talking about: knife gripped in four fingers and pulled towards thumb, which is braced on the fruit, removing a precise slice.
Back to right-handed cutting for now.
I’m right handed but I did a lot of things with my left hand that I took for granted until I hurt my left hand - like opening a door. Though my right hand was/is technically dominate, my left was stronger.
Strange thing is, my youngest daughter is just the opposite (and the only lefty in the family).
Leftie. I can do everything with my right hand except that my handwriting is worse. I have deliberately worked on using my right hand because I figure that lateralization is useful. I also have a little song to sing about how I’ve had a stroke and need assistance, since some people can sing after a stroke even if they can’t speak.