The trials and triumphs of left-handed people

My sister, who is left handed, tells me that she got a new stove cooktop and that the knobs are all on the right, which is a very awkward setup for her (and others like her, of course). She has a litany of woes of this sort. For example, gas pumps: “If you face them, the nozzle thing is on your far right, so you must train your right hand and arm to do the job.” Obviously, it’s a right-handed world. At least left-handed children are no longer forced to write with their right hands, as was the case with my friend Ruth, who tells me that “The hand change hurt my learning ability so much that it affected my self-esteem.”

There are plenty of advantages to being left handed. Most of you lefties process language on both sides of your brains. (Right handers process language mostly on the left side.) This may make you excel at language skills. Five of our last eight presidents were lefties, including Obama, Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan (not Trump, as you’ve probably surmised). 

Lefties are also over-represented in intellectually demanding professions, such as college professors, and appear to excel in math and music (Einstein and Newton were left handed). Lots of our cleverest people are/were left handed, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Jimi Hendrix. Leonardo da Vinci was famously left-handed. The list is actually quite long.

An interesting study found that left-handed men who finished four years of college earn 21 percent more than right-handed men with the same education. Oddly, this discrepancy doesn’t apply to women. Some theorize that left-handed men “think more like women;” that is, they can process several threads of information simultaneously. Because women already think like women (are multi-taskers), being left handed confers no added value in the marketplace.

Who knows? Maybe dealing with right-handed gas pumps and stove knobs serve to strengthen the already superior brains of you lefties! So get over it!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.