A Lefty's Revenge
Left at birth,
My brain was set.
Apart from most,
I knew.
Awkward, clumsy,
Gauche indeed.
My shitty hand,
Met every need.
Defender, fending dextrous foes.
Creator, writing spider prose.
Feeder, cleaner, closest aide.
The very heart of how I'm made.
Condemned by tyrant teachers, who
Adored the neat and right.
Spurned, as of the reject few.
So, clearly not too bright.
But that which sparkles in this world.
Great art and mighty minds.
Creators of the finest things,
Are often left inclined.
Boring, dull, conformity
And small, neat, tidy brains.
Stick to what is right for them
And fail to see our aims.
What once was just a hand preferred,
I now see, is much more.
A brain connected contrary,
To make the world less poor.
Malcolm Saunders
Fri 4th Jan 2008 10:11
Thanks Moxy, just getting the cart hell out of the garage now and I'm off. The screaming and suppurating wretches will probably have fallen off it by whitsun so I shouldn't disgrace the proceedings too much.
That last stanza Sophie. There are different degrees of left or right preference. I am one of those who is overwhelmingly so. I am not a particularly well coordinated person and I couldn't write anything right handedly to save my life. The truth is that I can't write very well with my left hand which is part of why I am so much more at home with a keyboard. (There is very little bird seed in my keyboard).
Anyway, back to the point. With the brain displacing so much motor activity to a different location relative to a right handed person I believe, and there is growing research evidence to support it, that other brain functions such as speech, language, imagination and hand-eye coordination are developed in different brain areas than they are in right handed people.
Left handed people do not live quite as long as right handers. This could be due to a higher accident rate through living in a world in which implements are predominantly designed for dexters, but there is some evidence that there is more to it than that. We are probably inherently more clumsy as a consequence of inferior hand-eye coordination. So far as the use of speech and language is concerned, things are much more complicated. Overall, women tend to have greater articulacy than men, but left handedness seems to improve speech and language use, so for a male left hander there are some advantages to be had in the use of words.
Sorry to go on so much, but what the stanza means is that I consider the different arrangement of brain function for us sinisters results in some enrichment of society because by products of the different motor arrangements include creative and linguistic outcomes that would not otherwise be there.
Your grandad probably hoped that he would help you to fit in with the norm and make your life easier. It was a misguided view that has now mostly gone away I am pleased to say. The fact that about 10% of the population are left handed indicates that there is an evolutionary reason why it is not eradicated.
All of my wives are left handed, but we have only produced right handed children.