When I was young, I went to a parochial school, and as part of how they did things, the prospect of my being my being inculcated into the world of the right-handed came up in first grade. Because there were a number of quite proud left-handers in my family, I was allowed to go my way, smudging my pencil work as I went.
I also have bouts of this sort of pride; a pride in the fact that my brain is wired a bit differently, regardless of any input on my part. Since I had nothing to do with it, this lesser brother of some of the seven deadly sins abates… But, as with most left-handers, there are a whole slew of subtle, unimportant differences in my daily life when compared to right-hander. These small differences added up to create a modern world which was less than interested in making my life any easier.
Admittedly, having to deal with right-handed scissors, table settings, notebooks, most firearms, and even in my case….guitars, hadn’t been a problem which rose to the level of the real misery which millions upon millions of people were going through at the same time. For instance, life was most certainly worse for many people who may have been living in China in the 1960’s, or almost anywhere in Southeast Asia, and so on. I’m not here to gripe or to raise the standard of victimhood here…
I guess the question I have for today is whether left-handedness makes as much difference in modern western culture as it had…even a couple decades ago…
An example of some of the things which have led me to consider this as an idea rest with the task of writing…I often wonder, when describing people who write a lot, whether the impact of the word processor has really eclipsed the pen. I can see cases, such as college students scribbling notes during lectures, or people scribbling little notes to themselves…but these are actually not really tasks which demand much from penmanship or any other aspect of handwriting.
I have had a chance to look into school curricula in several countries, and unlike when I was in elementary and middle school, typing is a mainstay of much of the skills which students actually learn. In most high schools, almost any serious writing assignments are now presumed to be prepared on computers. In an earlier post (a long time ago…maybe two months ago?), I was bemoaning the fact that while typing skills are growing amongst students, cursive writing is waning in importance.
So, with the withering of the focus upon handwriting, and the elevation of typing as a practical skill, does this also create a situation where handedness, if only in primary schools, becomes less and less important? This raises a number of subsequent questions and possibilities, such as with the title of this post, the connotational aura surrounding such terms as ‘dexter’ and ‘sinister’ (merely Latin for right and left). In a world where these differences become meaningless, what happens to these terms? Even today they have practical use, but in the future I have just described, I wonder…
Of course this doesn’t this will not hold everywhere, as a friend of mine mentioned with regard to a recent trip to India, about only eating with the right hand (draw your own inferences on this…). But in western society, I can’t think of any other sort of cultural limitations on this idea…
