Friday, September 22, 2006

Out of sorts

I am left-handed. Whether this has anything to do with Viking ancestry, I do not know. What I do know is that we are a persecuted minority in two main ways. Firstly, scissors and many other two-part implements are difficult for us to manipulate. Secondly, we are characterised in some very unflattering ways. Think of "kack-handed", for example. We fare little better in other languages:
French gaucher; Italian sinistro; Spanish zurdo; Portuguese canhoto
You see? In French we are gauche, awkward, clumsy. In Italian, we are sinister, not to be trusted. In Spanish, we are associated with the absurd, the unnatural. The Portuguese canhoto is also a word for the devil.
To be fair, there are languages which are non-judgmental, simply recording the fact that we are left-handed:
German linkshändig; Dutch linkshandige; Russian ЛЕВША
I have no idea about the following, but I would bet a bag of Bassett's Allsorts they are not saying anything nice:
Greek αριστερόχειρας; Arabic اليسار مسلم

It's possible - or it was - to be sacked for one's lefthandedness. As a student, I went to work in the sorting office at Wellington Post Office. There were rows and rows of pigeonholes for various destinations, and our task - there were several sorters to each bank of pigeonholes - was to flick the letters into the correct pigeon hole. Where they rested diagonally. I'm sure you are ahead of me. Yes, everyone else was right-handed, so their letters landed top right to bottom left. All of mine went top left to bottom right. End of my career as a Post Office sorter.
One more thing: please don't coil my hosepipe for me: it'll end up in a terrible tangle.

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