The Left Hand (Left-Handedness)

webfoot said:
So are there absolutely NO left handed muslims????How can that be?
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Way you're brought up, I suppose! :)

As I understand it, the Islamic (Shariah?) law punishment for a thief is to chop off the right hand, condemning the perp to forever eat only with the left (unclean) hand, and never in 'decent' company, but only with other 'unclean' folks.

I suppose getting 'convicts' to give each other food poisoning is one way to avoid recidivism! :cool:

Bit of a bummer (oops) if you're framed, though.
 
Ok but what about Western culture? At least when I was young it wasn't acceptable to be left handed. Maybe due to some weird notion of conformity or a lack of left handed supplies. Dunno and wish there was some valid explanation for my apparent left brain thinking when I am now a righty!
 
Perhaps part of the explanation is a bit more mundane. Almost everything in the world is designed for the right-handed! If anything, earlier times demanded a higher level of conformity than now.

I heard some slightly nutty story once that leftys could be the surviving twin from the womb. Many pregnancies start out as twins, with one being absorbed or something. No, I'm not a doctor, but I play one on this MB!;)

I'm a lefty (not gay, see earlier posts on some other thread) when writing golfing (once) or batting, but play instruments right-handed. No idea why.

Back to your question, I'm not sure how this could affect your cognitive ability. It could be old-fashioned dyslexia.
 
webfoot said:
yes, that WOULD work! I believe the teacher just taped my left hand to my head which would also be a pretty effective deterrent.
I think I heard (or read in some instructions)that the left hand was somehow associated with the devil???
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The Catholics regard the left hand as something to do with the Devil.
Many years ago, I met a young lady (who was a Catholic), and I told her that I was never formally baptised, being born into a Baptist family. She was frightened by this, and asked me to make the sign of the cross. Not being a Catholic myself, and not being familiar with any Catholic customs (and having a bag in my right hand), I used my left hand to do so.
She cowered with fear, babbling that I must be under the influence of the Devil, because I had used my left hand!
Apologies, but I have utter contempt for such stupidity.
 
I remember working with a left handed Muslim..

She, considered that being left handed was ideal for arabic script which is written from right to left. Except for eating, which must be done with the right hand.
 
The Catholics regard the left hand as something to do with the Devil.
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Really? I was raised in a catholic family but have never heard this legend before. I'm right-handed, but my sister is a leftie (in all senses of the word).

Jane.
 
Some odd stuff here, that I have never really thought about.

From my own experience, my daughter was a twin, and she is ambidextrous (had to look that one up) but these days the schools seem to let the kids decide which hand to use, and she has never really settled on any particular one
 
Isn't it supposed to be diecided that your left hande according to the way that your umbilicle cord twists in the womb?
 
Umm... Does that mean that in order to be ambidex... that thing, you have to be the middle triplet
 
I recall a friend telling me about an ambidextrous guitarist. This chap, instead of having a double-necked guitar, had a four-necked guitar/12-string/bass/electric mandolin (two necks to the left, two to the right). Always doubted it, myself, but does anyone know better...?.:confused:
 
Neanderthals

"There's a letter in the current FT about the struggle between the Neanderthal (left-handed) in us..."

I've read some archaeology books recently and it is believed that the Neanderthals are not direct species of modern day humans. So it is impossible for us to have Neanderthal specific genes.
I may be wrong though...
 
mejane said:
Really? I was raised in a catholic family but have never heard this legend before. I'm right-handed, but my sister is a leftie (in all senses of the word).

Jane.
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This young lady was Irish - her upbringing may have been a more extreme example of Catholicism than your own...
 
I'm left-handed, but when playing piano my right hand is the stronger and more dextrous. Also, I'm hopeless at using right-handed scissors, but curiously even *worse* with left-handed scissors, because I'm not used to them.

Last week I read in one of those "100 facts" email forwards that right-handed people generally live 8 years longer than left-handed people. Sounds like total guff to me, but does anyone have any knowledge of it?
 
Please god lets not do the Neanderthal/human breeding debate again for a while, last time I near enough called Tang Mallow a fascist and he near enough called me a half-wit. I was wrong and Tang was half wrong (Im actually a quarter-wit).
 
When I was at school it seemed that the majority of Lefthanders were blonde haired and blue eyed. Also there werent many of them. Now however there seems to be no pattern to the hair and eyes colours and also there seems to be a lot of them, i think they are no longer a small majority!
Does anybody else remember anything about an a study done in Sweden I think that linked Pre natel scans to brain damage and high occurences of lefthandedness in males?
Also with Left handers being so common, why are there so few really talented left footed footballers?:confused: :confused: :confused:
 
Are there actually talented footballers? If they have a talent, why are they playing football?
There's your answer! Left handers don't like football.
I have light brown hair and blue eyes, just so you know.
 
There was a study, about ten years ago, that claimed that a small excess of one of the male hormones at one stage of the embryos development lead to left handedness. A larger excess produced autism.

There was even a TV documentry on the subject, which claimed that statistics showed that more males than females were left handed & most autistic people showed a preference for using their left hand!!!!!

Ten years on, I still can't work out if there was any truth in it or not!!!!!!:(
 
Up until age five, I was right-handed; then I underwent a brain tumor operation. --After the operation, I had to re-learn everything, and I was left-handed. Do I get to be part of the evil master race of left-handers or not?
 
There's the other gay hand myth... I remember reading a while back that "research" had "shown" that you could tell gay men because their ring fingers were longer than their index fingers.

Three things struck me with this one

a) This is very dodgily reminiscent of Nazi techniques to tell who is Jewish (ie size of nose, ears etc were used as "proof". and used to decide who went to the death camps).

b) Who the hell decided to see if there was a correlation between finger length and sexual persuasion?! Bit of a stab in the dark there, methinks.

c) It sounds like a wind up. Call me mucky-minded, but it is significant that it's the "ring" finger that's supposed to be longer?!

However, I remember the research cropping up all over, from BBC news to the Guardian.

By the way the debunking of this has nothing to do with the fact my ring fingers are actually longer than my index fingers :( (ahem)
 
Evilsprout said:
There's the other gay hand myth... I remember reading a while back that "research" had "shown" that you could tell gay men because their ring fingers were longer than their index fingers.
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That's just daft! Are you lot determined to have me being a rampant Julian Clarey? I was told by my English teacher that I wrote one of my essays very like Oscar Wilde...:eek!!!!:
 
Sinister is from the latin word for "left", which was sinistus or something like that. Its been a bit since I took latin, but its defiently derived. The Romans also had a bad connotation with left handedness.
And I heard the gay-left handed thing, and I also heard that they die earlier. Left handed people.
 
Just to add to the thing with fingers, I think a study also showed that if you looked at (straight) couples that had stayed together a long time, they all had the same length of earlobe. Which to me just seems to show that statistics sometimes comes up with some stranges stuff.
 
Sorry, Xanatic, but statistics about straight couples who have been
together for years are never going to make compulsive reading,
no matter how long their lobes grow. :(

What I want to know is if cats living with Lesbians become Sapphic.

No jokes about fish please. :p
 
Evilsprout said:
There's the other gay hand myth... I remember reading a while back that "research" had "shown" that you could tell gay men because their ring fingers were longer than their index fingers.

....

c) It sounds like a wind up. Call me mucky-minded, but it is significant that it's the "ring" finger that's supposed to be longer?!

....
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If it's the research project that I recall seeing, it had nothing to do with sexual orientation, but rather seemed to demonstrate that men whose ring finger was significantly longer than their index finger were more prone to depression. And no, I don't know how long 'significantly' longer is!
 
I was watching a History Channel prog on the Gulf War (interesting timing eh?) and noticed that George Bush Sr. was left-handed. This idle thought led me to look up who else was a leftie, and it turns out that all the presidents back to and including Reagan were lefties.

Left-Handed U.S. Presidents
James A. Garfield (1831-1881) 20th
Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) 31st
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) 33rd
Gerald Ford (1913- ) 38th
Ronald Reagan (1911 - ) 40th
George H.W. Bush (1924- ) 41st
Bill Clinton (1946- ) 42nd

Is Dubya a leftie? Should we be reading anything into this? :eek:

http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/left.html
 
I'm right handed... and do everything with my right hand...
except eat popcorn. If I'm eating popcorn, or anything by hand out of a bowl, I ALWAYS use only my left hand. Just a weird habit, probably because my right hand used to always be on the remote, or keyboard, and didn't want it all greasy.
 
Wasn't there a similar thread, elsewhere, aeons ago?

For the record, I'm bi-dextrous too. That is to say I'm mainly left-handed -- I write, draw, use mice, open doors and generally lead with my left hand, but I do use my right hand for some things, too --- brushing my teeth, buttering my bread, playing tennis, etc.

I also play guitar right-handed and play a strong treble clef with it on the piano, too. As far as personality types go, Myers-Briggs has me down as an ENTP, according to which I'm quick, innovative, easily bored and entertaining (hurrah!).

Strangely, all of my previous boyfriends have been left-handed musicians. My current paramour, however, is a righty and is equally balanced between being arty and sciency as I am.

I also have a strong tendency to fall over, spill things and generally make a disaster area of myself. I don't know what that might have to do with anything.
 
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