Times have changed – and you just can’t beat a leftie anymore

When I say proudly that I was possibly one of the first generation of lefties to survive after a long era of extermination, it’s not an admission of some shady Soviet Union past.

The lefties in this case were the citogs; the children who wrote with their left hands – and we were among the first five-year-olds not to have it literally beaten out of us.

Now the stats show that around one in ten people is left-handed – among them Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, JK Rowling, Tom Cruise, Bob Geldof and Robert di Niro for a start.

There were always left-handers of course, because the Irish primary school system didn’t stretch to all corners of the world and therefore some people didn’t have their left hand tied behind their backs to force them to ‘write properly’.

And obviously this wasn’t just an Irish phenomenon; the frequency of left-handed writing in the US, for example, was just over two per cent in 1932, but, once the restraining and slapping stopped, it rose to over eleven per cent by 1972.

JFK was a leftie in this sense – as, coincidently, was Marilyn Monroe – along with Aristotle, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Reubens, Caesar, Einstein, Bonaparte, Churchill and Jack the Ripper.

But for generations, the world really only wanted right-handed writers; sometimes because they believed that left-handers were, quite literally, unclean.

In some parts of the world – in order to preserve cleanliness where sanitation was an issue – people used their right hand, their dominant hand, for eating, handling food, and social interactions.

The left hand would then be used for personal hygiene, specifically after urination and defecation.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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