Fortunately enough I mostly escaped the southpaw erasure bullshit.
My uncle would tease me for being a “lefty.” By calling me a “lefty.”
My grandmother had a tendency to ask passive-aggressive questions. Like “Why do you only ever wear one pair of shoes?” Because I’m four years old and I’ll outgrow these before I wear them out. Why buy more than one?" Or “Can’t you put your foot out straight?” No, I can’t. It got bent in the womb and the corrective shoe I wore when I was 0.5 did a reasonable job but it’s still a little crooked and there’s really nothing I can do about it that isn’t very uncomfortable. “Why don’t you use your right hand?” Because I’m left handed.
The way my mother tells it, when it was time for me to start drawing with crayons, she put a crayon in my right hand and then colored some with her own crayon to show me how, and I transferred my crayon to my left hand and started coloring, and mama said “Oh he’s left handed. Okay.” And from there she would hold out spoons or writing utensils and let me take them with the hand I preferred.
In school, none of the faculty ever tried to force me to be right-handed, though my elementary school teachers had no idea how to teach handwriting to a lefty. I did have a fifth grade teacher who, for reasons only known to the bug in her cunt, REQUIRED the use of a spiral-bound notebook. Right handed folks might not realize, lefties end up resting their hands against the spiral bindings at the beginning of every line and it starts to hurt. A spiralless notebook was just unacceptable.
I was just talking about my first and second grade years today. It was 1977/78. Both teachers those two grades tied my left hand down and forced me to try to learn to write with my right hand. What it did was make my handwriting absolutely terrible. This was due to the fact that in the third grade they didn’t teach you that anymore and I never had any practice at it. My parents didn’t care it happened since my dad was convinced a left handed man just couldn’t match a right handed mans abilities. It was because the school nearly got sued by another students parents that they finally ended that bit of abuse. This is the southern US by the way. The place that is permanently out of step with decency.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. I grew up left handed in socal 90s and had a few people in my education try to correct it just by pointing it out but nobody forced me. When I was learning to write my name I would write it backwards and mirrored haha, brains are funny.
Da Vinci did the same!
Everyone is born right-handed. Only the greatest overcome it.
I got slapped by my teacher infront of everyone for pointing and showing with my left hand, that the answer I have written on the answer sheet is correct and I should get the marks. Then he lectured me for ten minutes about not using my left hand ever again in his presence. Flamed my parents that they should have taught me that and are bad at parenting. He finally gave me full marks, but I cried the whole day and got humiliated infront of whole class. This happened in 2000s
My teacher had broken me by performing the Jane Elliot experiment in our classroom.
My best friend had blue eyes and we weren’t allowed to play because he was inferior.
It was second grade.
But this was 1992.
I’m probably a better person for the experience, ultimately…but damn if that ain’t fucked up for some 7-8 year olds.
I woulda kicked him directly in the dick immediately.
1950? This happened to me in the 90s
Same, it’s insane how many teachers saw it and thought “not on my watch”
Happened to me in 2000 😅
Yeah, this happened to my mom. She still gets left & right mixed up all the time. We blame it on them making her become right-handed.
Same here but in the 80s. Teacher would slap my hand with a ruler and force me to switch to my right hand. She also regularly told me I was evil and had the devil in me. My mom came to the school after she found out and nearly killed that teacher.
I’m still a lefty.
I may or may not be evil…
We’re literally sinister.
Where are you from, Alabama 100 years from now?
Christ.
3rd grade teacher, first day of school. Was writing my name on my desk card. Next thing I know, I had yard stick slam down on my wrist. Got hit so hard that my wrist was swollen for days after
The fuck. Where?
Their wrist, they already said.
(❤)
Mississippi
Ahhh good old bottom of the charts for most state rankings.
Sorry you had to go through that. I’m a lefty and would have probably ended up in detention if they had tried that with me by 3rd grade.
You know that feeling when you’re shocked and appalled, but not the least bit surprised? The one all good people have experienced with alarming frequency for the last decade or so?
I’ve been lamenting that there’s no name for it, but you know what? Let’s just call it Mississippi, since the consistently worst state in the Union (and for a while the worst state in the Confederacy, probably) is pretty much synonymous with that feeling.
Started school in 2001, my mother - a lefthanded person herself! - tried the first 4 years of primary school to get me to write with the “correct” hand (unsuccessfully)
You can thank the Romans’ adoption of the Bible for that stigma.
In Latin, sinestra means on the left side. Left handed people were referred to as sinister. After the appearance of Eve on Adam’s left side in accounts of Genesis, the Christian tradition finds instances of the left side being pinned to immorality. As a result, some time during the Latin Classical Era the definition shifted to its current meaning of evil.
There’s also less left-handed people so they’re easier to pick on, and people in the past really delighted on being assholes
we’re better at swordfighting though.
They still do. But they used to to.
Explanation: It used to be fairly normal for teachers in the US, at least, to ‘correct’ left-handed children by striking their hand or otherwise punishing them for using it for primary-hand tasks. My great-uncle suffered this bizarre form of correction as a child.
One of my high school teachers became ambidextrous because of this.
They tied his left arm behind his back at a certain point because he just kept using it.
This was a thing I’m Europe as well in the 50’s. My mom regularly got a slapping with a ruler or got kicked into the coal shed for writing left handedly
The good ol’ days. Kids these days don’t appreciate a good coal shed anymore.
My grandpa passed away in 2008 from mesothelioma.
Found out from my mom that back when he was young, the local factories would leave out these giant white fluffy piles of asbestos dust that kids would play in.
Can’t believe we never got to experience that fun, stupid liberals banning everything.
To be fair, they don’t make coal sheds like they used to… 🤷
My partner suffered this form of correction in the late 80s.
This happened to me in 2003 in upstate New York
my dad and grandma both went through this
My Grandfather also had this experience and came out ambidextrous
My wife is 50 and she was almost forced to be right handed in late '70s/ early '80s. She is still left-handed, but she is almost ambidextrous. Maybe forcing people to do things with their weak hand isn’t a bad thing, but obviously we shouldn’t mandate they can only use their right hand. What if we had a society full of ambidextrous people? What if we force people to learn how to write with both hands?
She might be cross-dominant. This apparently confused/annoyed my teachers growing up. I only write with my left hand and do almost everything else with my right side.
I write left handed but do some sports activities right handed, like golf, unlike my brother who plays it left handed but writes with his right hand. Not even blood related, technically step brothers but we only bring that up in bars after confusing people since we look nothing alike. for baseball I keep having to remember which hand I prefer to throw with to figure it out, I’m not good at sports anyways heh.
I throw like Lisa Simpson with my left hand even though I tried to train it. You might be more ambidextrous than cross-dominant.
I’m right handed but left legged. I did long jump and jumped about 4 feet farther using my left leg. Does that count? I know it’s different but I find this kind of stuff interesting.
Isn’t that how it usually is? Having the eye and leg be opposed to the hand, I mean?
I’m not 100% sure, but nearly every left-handed writer I’ve met does everything with that side maybe minus their dominant eye. But unlike me they still throw, kick, etc. with their left side. I suppose cross-dominance is more common than people realize since it was trained out of so many generations.
No, handedness is the main thing that’s uneven
My dominant eye is definitely right side, same as my hand. I don’t know statistically though.
Yep that’s an example of it.
Maybe forcing people to do things
I can’t get past this horseshit statement.
I grew up in the 90s and went to public school, so I didn’t have this experience. What I did experience was using the shittiest scissors in the classroom, and having to share it with 3 other kids because there was exactly one left handed pair.
Also lots of criticism about my handwriting.
My handwriting is terrible, I’m right handed. I blame it on being an engineer.
Well known fact those destined to be engineers and doctors learn to write badly in school, takes years of training to write this badly.
Finally an explanation I can relate with.
Knuckle rapping: for those naughty kids in Catholic school. And also lefties.
My eyes saw only one “p”. I was quite concerned, until I saw Catholic school.
My 3rd grade teacher did that shit and is one of several reasons I went into homeschooling between 4th and 8th grade. Wasn’t even a Catholic school; it was public.
Write hand!
Everyone knows the left hand is the sinister one…
In Spanish the right and left are called diestra (dexterous) and siniestra (sinister) respectively.
That’s Italian, in Spanish it’s Derecha and izquierda.
That would be “destra” and “sinistra”, actually. “diestra” sounds like something made up by an American LARPing as an Italian
Never heard a Spanish person use diestra or siniestra on a day to day basis. I assume that’s like destra e sinistra in Portuguese (my native language) that are very rare synonyms used when someone wants to sound pretentious.
I never said it was common.
That originates from Latin actually.
Well. It’s Spanish. Most of it originated from Latin.
I know them as derecha e izquierda for the directions and I’m bilingual in spanish.
Diestro is right handed but for left handed I hear zurdo more. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use siniestro.
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Source?
There is no source, you can easily google this. Its a combination of genetics, cultural factors, and maybe even birth circumstances, i.e. birth weight, sex, whether you’re a twin, could all be factors. But the web also says we really don’t know why there are less left handed people than right handed people. This person is a bozo spouting off misinformation, maybe to be funny?
Look at his profile and account name, he’s trolling.
In the original sense of the word from like 20 years ago before it got applied to a million other types of behavior.
I mean, that’s great and all, but with the huge rate of misinformation and intentionally disinformation today, people don’t really appreciate (don’t know if we ever did), trolling like that anymore. Hence the huge amount of downvotes.
I hear you but trolls are usually trying to get downvoted anyway.
Plus, trolling can be funny sometimes, when it’s done well. On the topic of being left handed, it seems pretty harmless to me. If they were trolling about political topics and such, that’d be much less funny and more problematic.
Which is what I was trying to get them to admit.
A good troll never admits it.
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Get lost asshat.
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Your making shit up is what you’re doing…
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Thanks, typing on a phone is hard. Couldn’t have gone without that minor correction.
For anyone even remotely considering this troll, left-handedness is polygenic (multiple factors).
Anecdotal: I have twins, and one was drawing left-handed from the moment they could draw.
