Southpaws Are Not Left Out in a Mostly Right-Handed World

Look down at your keyboard. Check out the keys to the right of the main typing area.

If you have a full-sized keyboard hooked up to a desktop (as opposed to a smaller laptop), you’ll find a handy keypad for inputting numbers. Also in the same area is a set of directional keys useful when playing fast-action computer games and a few helper keys with names such as “home,” “page down” and “help.”

For approximately 89% of people, these keys are in just the right place. But for other computer users--those who are left-handed--this standard keyboard has become just another obstacle in a mostly right-handed world that must be uncomfortably accommodated.

If you’re not left-handed (and I’m not), you have scant realization of the everyday adaptations lefties have to make. And so it’s no surprise that on the Internet--which has become a haven for minorities of all types who seek to share experiences--left-handed sites are well represented.

Many of them express pride and a bit of resentment toward the rest of us--one Web site creator refers to us as “the other-handers.”

The Web page of Canadian Lori Pringle includes her “Top Ten List of Things That Annoy Left-Handers,” including right-handed scissors, sitting to the right of a right-hander while trying to write and “the thought that if you’d been born a few centuries earlier, you’d have been burned at the stake for witchcraft.”

The penalties for left-handedness are no longer so severe, but several Web pages include tales of parents and teachers trying to force young lefties into “converting.” Wai-Hang Lam, now a pre-med student at New York University, writes about his childhood in Hong Kong, where teachers would tie his left hand down to ensure that he would have to use his right.

You can read his story at https://pages.nyu.edu/~whl203/lefty/lefty.htm#return.

Several of the pages point out that “left” has taken on negative connotations in common insults, such as a “left-handed compliment” or saying that someone is “out in left field.”

On the other hand, so to speak, lefties take great pride in famous left-handers, of whom there are many. One of the most extensive lists can be found through the home page of Lorin Elias, at https://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~ljelias.

Under famous lefties in politics/leaders, you’ll find four of the last five presidents (Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Ford), as well as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Gandhi, Benjamin Netanyahu and Fidel Castro.

In the arts, there are Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Beethoven, Maurice Ravel, H. G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, Cole Porter, Richard Pryor, Annie Lennox and Whoopi Goldberg.

In sports, the list includes Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, Arnold Palmer and Martina Navratilova.

And under “unclassified” are Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Helen Keller, Bill Gates and Richard Simmons.

What do all these people have in common, besides being left-handed? Seemingly nothing, which is why scientists are still hard pressed to come up with an explanation for why left-handedness occurs.

Elias, who is a graduate student in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Canada, explains several theories on his site, including the once-popular “sword and shield” hypothesis that claimed left-handed sword fighters were less able to protect their hearts with their shields, and thus were less likely to survive and pass on their genes. Elias also lances the more current theory that a higher than normal level of testosterone causes left-handedness.

For more whimsical reading, there’s Rosemary West’s page at https://www.rosemarywest.com/left/rleftx.html, which features an enormous number of links to people, artworks and writings associated with left-handedness. And lefties can keep up with the latest by checking in with the newsgroup alt.lefthandedness, which has a recent string of messages warning its members to take special care in operating buzz saws, which were designed for righties.

Finally, there are plenty of shopping opportunities on the Web. Most of the major sites concerning left-handedness include links to shops (some are online) specializing in lefty goods and tools, including potato peelers, golf clubs, scissors, guitars and, of course, computer keyboards.

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Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.