People who know me will be surprised by this but here’s a confession: I can be prone to occasional outbursts of anger. Yep, mild-mannered old me. And I’ll tell you what triggers it: clumsiness. Dropping a small screw, for example, while balancing on a ladder, triggers uncontrolled explosions of loud and determined swearing. Once, when I was rewiring a ceiling rose, I had the neighbours come round and complain.
“But I dropped a screw!” I pleaded.
“Ah,” they replied. “Fair enough. Carry on.”
What I’ve come to learn, though, as I grow older – and it would be good to pass this on to the younger generation before they make the same mistakes I have – is that there is no way of getting your own back on an inanimate object. A fallen screw will just lie there, impassive, unflinching from your tirade of invective. It will not see the error of its ways. It will not repent. It will not bow down in meek apology, nor will it rise and re-insert itself into the fiddly light fitting that you were trying to fix in the first place.
So instead I’ve developed a new mantra: ‘Don’t get mad, get dextrous.’ The message is quite simple. Acknowledge that if you drop something, or stub your toe on something, or bang your funny bone on something, or bash your head on something, or whack your knee against something, it’s not the fault of the thing, it can only be your fault, usually because you were rushing it. So the mantra is my little reminder to slow down, concentrate and apply the manual dexterity which we humans have been gifted. You’d be amazed by the results. Even if you’re left handed.
I say this because the left hand is not associated with coordination. The word ‘dexterity’ comes from the Latin ‘dexter’, meaning ‘right’, which implies that right-handers are more coordinated than lefties. ‘Gauche’, meaning clumsy, and ‘adroit’, meaning skilful, come from the French for left and right respectively. We all know this isn’t true, though, don’t we. While lefties make up only around 10% of the world population, they occupy a disproportionately large space in the Sporting Elegance Hall of Fame.
John McEnroe. Martina Navratilova. David Gower. Brian Lara. Glenn Hoddle. Ryan Giggs. Phil Mickelson. Jimmy White… OK I’m showing my age, but you get the gist. Do write in with your modern examples.
A lot of creative people are lefties too. Paul McCartney. Jimi Hendrix. Lady Gaga. Justin Bieber. (See, I can do modern too.) Rembrandt. Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo. Raphael. Bart Simpson. And presumably the same was true in Roman times too.
It doesn’t take much common sense to work out that the association of the right hand with coordination and left hand with the opposite pertained to right-handed people, rather than people in general. Yet over the centuries it was consistently applied across the board. ‘Gauche’, meaning clumsy, and ‘adroit’, meaning skilful, come from the French for left and right.
Once upon a time, such prowess as the likes of Hoddle and Gaga possessed would have been branded as witchcraft. The word ‘sinister’ was Latin for ‘left’, and connotations of left-handedness and evil have been so rife in the history of our species that many natural lefties have been forced to learn to use their weaker hand just to fit in. That includes Arnold Palmer and Jack Niklaus.
Indeed, even today there does appear to be a correlation between social freedom and left- and right-handedness. The highest proportion of left-handers is in the famously liberal Netherlands. The lowest is in the notoriously illiberal China. And it’s a big difference: 13.23% compared to just 3.50%. Something sinister lies behind that statistic surely.
The natural predominance of right-handers among the human population is unusual in the animal kingdom as a whole. Most creatures, including the other apes, are ambidextrous. Notable exceptions are the kangaroo, which mostly boxes southpaw, and the parrot, which favours its left leg for picking things up.
So I’ve gone out and bought a parrot to help me with rewiring jobs. Not only is it more dextrous than me, it doesn’t need the ladder.
