THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 5, 1996 TAG: 9601050050
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JENNIFER DZIURA, HIGH SCHOOL CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 119 lines
ENGLAND'S MASS murderer Jack the Ripper was never caught, but we know that he was left-handed.
Jack, you see, would grab his victims from behind and, with his left hand, slit their throats from right to left - an impossibility for a knife-wielding right-hander.
Left-handed people, or those who are sinistral, comprise somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of the population. Their numbers include not only Jack the Ripper and Billy the Kid, but Julius Caesar and Napoleon, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and half of the Beatles, Paul and Ringo.
Despite conquering most of Europe, discovering relativeity, painting the Sistine Chapel and performing ``Strawberry Fields Forever,'' left-handers throughout history have been considered gauche.
According to Rae Lindsay's ``The Left-Handed Book,'' the term sinistral is Latin for ``on the left'' or ``unlucky.'' That same bit of Latin gives us the word sinister, meaning ``indicative of lurking evil.''
Mancini, Italian for ``left'' also means ``crooked'' and ``maimed.'' The Spanish zurdo means ``left'' but is a synonym for malicioso or ``evil.''
No ser zurdo in Spanish means ``to be very clever.'' It translates as ``not to be left-handed.'' Another Spanish idiom still in use involves saying to left-handed people ``Oh, you poor person, you won't go to heaven.''
During the Salem witch trials, left-handedness was evidence of witchcraft. And French superstition maintains that the devil himself is not only sinister, but sinistral as well.
In America, at least, such stigmas are only to be gawked at. The biggest problem with being left-handed, claims sinistral Maureen Thorson, 17, is the scissors.
Maureen, a Cox High senior, explains: ``The most horrible experience any left-handed child will have is with scissors because your teachers will not merely suggest, but absolutely insist, that you use left-handed scissors, which were created by some sort of evil entity, as they cannot be used by anyone with any type of hands.''
Left-handed scissors, it seems, have holes into which only the fingers of certain rare, nonhuman species will fit. Awash in bitter kindergarten memories, Maureen claims that, compared to using lefty scissors, ``it is actually easier to cut through paper with your teeth.''
``The second hardship I have endured by being left-handed is in the form of desks,'' Maureen added.
School desks are generally entered from the left, thus meaning that there is a big void on the side of the desk where sinistral students would prefer that their elbows be. Thus, a young pupil clutching his pencil in his left hand must turn his body at a grotesque angle in order to get his left elbow anywhere close to resting on the desktop.
Sitting 60 degrees east of normal, the lefty then finds that he is facing entirely the wrong direction. He may either continue to stare at a blank wall until his eyes develop this kind of day-old glazed doughnut look or else he must twist his neck 60 degrees west.
``You tend to look very silly,'' says Maureen.
Under the auspices of majority rule, much of the rest of the world has been designed for right-handed people, or those who are dextral. Old-fashioned pencil sharpeners, for example, are notoriously difficult for lefties to operate. Cameras are built with shutters on the right, making them awkward for the left-handed. Keyboards and typewriters have most of the important keys on the right, and the major functions of an automobile are controlled with the right side of the body.
To help lefties feel more adroit, inventors and marketers have created left-handed irons, cameras, bowling gloves, grapefruit knives, power saws, guitars, archery sets and ice cream scoops.
One product of questionable merit is the left-handed boomerang, which was mentioned in ``The Left-Handed Book.''
``I am visualizing a boomerang,'' says Maureen. ``You can throw boomerangs from either hand.''
She had a similar response to the left-handed diaper pin. ``Whether a pin is right- or left-handed,'' she remarks, ``depends on which way you pin it. It's up to you, the user. Why not just buy regular pins and save your time and money? I think some of this `left-handed' junk is really just regular junk.''
While lefties may lack dexterity, however, they are hardly as oppressed as, say, your average Tibetan.
``I'm not bothered by the fact that elevator buttons are usually on the right side. I just go to the right and push them with my right hand,'' notes Maureen. ``I'm not bothered by the fact that you put change in the right side of a Coke machine. It's not like my right hand is completely useless. It can hold things.''
Maureen comments that whoever's making left-handed thermometers and rulers (really - the numbers can be read from right to left), ``must think that we got our right hands chopped off at the elbow.''
But, despite there being nothing but a visible mass of water particles, every dark cloud is supposed to have a silver lining.
When sinistral people eat, according to ``The Left-Handed Book,'' most of them hold the knife with their right hand and the fork with their left, never having to switch the fork from one hand to the other. Everyone eats this way in Europe; in America, however, the left-handed end up looking far more graceful than their dextral dinner companions.
Public telephones also favor the left-handed. ``Although it was designed for dialing and depositing coins with the right hand, the receiver is usually held to the left ear, a lefty's ``better ear' ,'' says author Lindsay.
And, finally, the daily need to operate right-handed apparatus like pencil sharpeners, Coke machines and possibly thermometers makes lefties more ambidextrous; they are able to use their right hands far better than right-handed people can use their left hands.
But, merits and demerits aside, why would the forces of nature conspire to create human beings who favored different sides of their little bipedal forms?
Perhaps the forces of nature were colluding to foment from the earth the town of Left Hand, W.Va. (pop. 500), or the left-handed tea bag, or the Sistine Chapel, which would have taken a long time to complete had Michelangelo not been able to paint alternately with both hands.
Or perhaps there's a lesson to be learned. Like ``Being left-handed is a really dumb reason to be burned at the stake,'' or ``Despite our differences, we can all throw the same boomerang.'' I may be right, but maybe I'm just out in left field. ILLUSTRATION: SAM HUNDLEY/The Virginian-Pilot
by CNB