Left Handers, any difficulties?

Leftie, and the only thing I’ve ever had a problem with is the smudging ink issue at school. I’d say other than avoiding that, and using scissors/mouse with the right hand, he shouldn’t really have any problems.

Personally:
Two-handed bat/racquet/club sports (golf, cricket, baseball) I play right-handed, one-handed ones I play left-handed. Use scissors and a mouse with my right hand naturally, watch goes on left wrist. Feel more comfortable in a RHD car. Right-footed, skateboard goofy, but push with front foot (which is wrong). Right-foot forwards feels more natural on a bike with the pedals level too. Suppose I’m kind of ambidextrous then…!

I use a mouse in the right hand which leaves my good hand for keyboard short cuts etc.

I do this too, but it’s a lucky coincidence rather than by design. The first mouse I used was on an Atari ST; it plugged into the side of the computer and the cable wasn’t long enough to have the mouse on the left.

Minor things, but irritating.

These days, it’s the little things that wind me up most.

Like, the Mondeo I’ve just parted company with had a spring-loaded key. Press a button and the key blade swings out of the side. Except, if you’re left handed it springs into the palm of your hand instead.

Pens tethered to the right hand side of the counter in petrol stations and banks is another one. Would it kill you to make the cord six inches longer?

The hardest thing for me being left handed was to learn to use a chainsaw right handed!

I would not recommend holding a chainsaw left handed as its considered very dangerous!

When he is old enough get him a left handed cork screw, that can be fun watching a right handed person trying to use 😉

http://www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk/how-lh/corkscrew.html#sthash.zEp2P45r.dpbs

I’m perfectly happy using mice and trackpads with my right hand, but not spanners.

See, I can use spanners with either* but I can’t use a mouse very well with the other hand. Being able to use a mouse and write at the same time is pretty fantastic though 🙂

PS Cougar I would have put you down for an Atari man, funny that. But you can hold those Ford keys upside-down it still works.

* when working on cars sometimes only one hand will fit one way up, so you have to manage!

+: more likely that first critical punch will get through when scrapping
-: will lose more arm wrestles

My school forced me to write with fountain pens which was the bane of my life. I never really worked out a way to completely write without smudging, I just switched to pencils and biros as soon as I could.
School also had the mice cable clamped to the desk on the right side so I had to learn to use it that side, now I don’t like using it on the left. I was even forced to for a while when I broke my wrist but went straight back to right handed as soon as I could. I always think it’s strange, as an engineer it would be really useful to have my right hand free for the number pad but it just doesn’t feel right.

The knack for using right handed scissors is to contort your hand to force the blades together, but I guess it will be a while till be can do that. Left handed rulers are really useful but I also think it’s best not to be dependent on these things.

Leftie. some things are more of a pain than others. Right handed writing was beaten into me (Thanks Mrs Edwards) 👿 . Scissors are right handed, by the time I realised there were left handed ones, they felt weird. changing knives and forks over seems to annoy more people than it should.

I write with my left hand, but do everything else with the right side of my body. My older brother and sister are true lefties, and i think i decided that i wanted to write like they did so used my left!

Lefty – play right-handed guitars. Learn on RH from the start & it should never be an issue

My wife is a leftie

She has trouble using a potato peeler

I’m a leftie, no problem using scissors in either hand I sussed out as a nipper how to use r/h scissors in my left hand, handwriting can be a bit smudgy at times, use a mouse r/h as when I first started using one I decided I’d need my l/h free to write notes if needed, cricket l/h or r/h, right footed for football, lead with my left foot on a bike.

To be honest I think with most things I’ve decided I’ll use a certain side for one reason or another and just gone with it. About the only thing that I find a real challenge using my right for is writing.

Where I do think there is an advantage being a leftie is with the trend for a mouse/control wheel in a cars centre console. As usually the car has been designed for a l/h drive market so a person would naturally use their dominant hand (r/h) on the control. So when a car comes over here most people find the control at their left to be a challenge, well apart from use lefties.

Forgot about bloody peelers!!

Being left handed is ace at school playing rounders, you can amble round at your own pace when the other team are all running from one side of the field to the other.

Peelers are fine as long as you use your own and don’t let any righties use it; it’s when they twist a bit they start getting rubbish. Those U shaped ones are much better.

Cake forks, though. The blade bit is on the wrong side. The bane of my middle-class existence… until I was given a left handed one! Win.

You have to love molgrips – as a right hander posting on a thread about left handers and telling us it isn’t that difficult. I’ll bear that in mind for the future – thanks.

It isn’t worth getting all that special left-handed stuff as has been said – it is a RH world and not worth carting a load of scissors / cake forks / rulers around – just get used to the normal ones. My writing is crap and I do smudge the ink, as did most of the LH kids at my school. Probably not a problem for kids now.

Oh for the black and white world of a leftie or righty. I have cross-dominance, which is not quite left, not quite right, not quite ambidextrous.

I write with my right hand, hold stuff with handles with my left, but can also do right, I play drums right and left handed, Guitar right hand only, Football with both left and right, knife and fork opposite way around, and on and on.

People with cross-dominance are supposed to have issues like which is the dominant eye, and balance issues. I seem to be alright with eye dominance, but the balance stuff might explain a few of the weird crashes I’ve had on my bike. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. 😳

I should add,

I’m very definitely left-handed. I’m left footed, and left eye dominant. Naturally, I do very very few things right-handed.

I play pool right-handed for no discernible reason, and figured a while back that the wrong-eye dominant thing was causing me to be rubbish so I forced myself to relearn. Now I’m equally shit with both hands.

I shoot (a bow) right-handed, but that’s because the only equipment available when I was learning was right-handed; my instinct was to shoot left. By the time I got hold of a lefty bow I’d been shooting so long wrong-handed that I just couldn’t use it. (For archery, the key thing is your dominant eye rather than your dominant hand, so I really should have persevered. Ho hum.)

Writing, I have a natural style (as opposed to some lefties who twist the paper or hook their hand, or some other oddness). Throughout school I got told off for having bad handwriting and pressing on too hard; it’s only now in hindsight I’ve realised that with your left hand you’re pushing the pen into the paper rather than pulling it over, so of course I press on too hard.

The knife and fork thing is an odd one, because I really don’t understand the logic that says you use a fork / spoon in your right hand, but switch hands if a knife is involved. That’s just weird. I hold a fork in my left regardless, so right-handed place settings are correct for me already.

Scissors it’s worth learning wrong-handed because as others have said, the number of times you’ll need to use scissors in your life that aren’t your ‘special’ ones make it more bother than just changing hands. Naturally the pressure from your thumb pushes the blades together, but if you change hands that same force pushes them apart; as a kid, I just used my right hand, but you can use them left-handed if you make a conscious effort to ‘pull’ counter-intuitively with your thumb. I use them in my right hand now without thinking about it, but knowing that is a useful skill when you’re using nail scissors.

Serrated knives are a ‘gotcha’. The serrates are on one side, and counteract natural twisting of the wrist as you cut; left-handed they amplify the twist instead. For years I thought I was hopeless at cutting bread (unless you like bread wedges), getting a lefty knife was a revelation.

One thing I caught myself doing relatively recently is opening bottles wrong. Instinctively I hold the bottle in my left and twist the cap with my right, so you move your arms / elbows outwards which isn’t very strong. Swapping round and holding the cap with my left, your arms lever inwards and you can get more force behind it. Only took me 40 years to work that one out.

Shoelaces and such is arguably easier to learn if you’re left-handed. You perfectly mirror the person teaching you. That’s true of a lot of things.

My wife is a leftie

She has trouble using a potato peeler

You can get double-edged ones. I inherited my gran’s “Lancashire peeler” – it’s blunt as buggery right-handed, but the left-hand edge was a virgin blade.

Can openers were my nemesis for years. I contorted my hands around in a bizarre manner with my wrists crossed. I’ve un-learned that now, though.

Left-handed corkscrews are ace; not because they help in any sort of meaningful way but because they mess with people’s heads when they get a taste of what it’s like to live day-to-day in a wrong-handed world.

PS Cougar I would have put you down for an Atari man, funny that.

I was an early adopter; the Amiga wasn’t available when I got the ST.

But you can hold those Ford keys upside-down it still works.

Sure, it was just a random example. A lot of user interfaces are hand-ist though. Mobile phones where the edge buttons are placed perfectly for your thumb, for instance. I can’t offhand (ho ho!) think of a better example, but I very very regularly pick stuff up and growl quietly to myself about it.

Leftie
Defeated my mothers determined attempts to teach me to knit
Never found a left handed fish knife and right handed ones are useless

Reading the above and compiling a shopping list 🙂

I’m hilariously left handed, a fact not assisted by the plethora of broken and plated bones in my right hand and wrist. I do remember reading that forcing children to be wrong handed can cause developmental issues, so it would be worth looking at that aspect. I can’t imagine that applies to infrequently used objects like scissors or bread knives though. I, like most other lefties, have learnt to get by on these things. Anything requiring a level of dexterity such as guitar you’d benefit from Lh specific equipment.

I find that using a keyboard as a leftie got a lot easier when I discovered CTRL&Insert / Shift&Insert for copying and pasting. I type a lot of numbers as well, so having the mouse in my left with the number pad right in front of my right hand is perfect for me.

Never knew that fact about knives, thanks for that, years of wonky bread slices could be at an end. Or I could hack a finger off using a knife in my right hand…

well being catholic didnt help in the 80’s my dad tried to force me to be right-handed, so now i am right handed in some ways and left in others. i write left handed and also for tennis, but play golf with the right, also open bottles and use scissors with the right.

it didnt do me any harm, but only pain was as a kid at school when having to use a fountain pen with my left hand my hand kept smudging the ink, VERY annoying.

Forgot about these!

Can remember back in the day, getting so frustrated that the fire button was on the left, most of the time the fire did not seem to work properly if you were left handed, my excuse for losing so often 😉

Does anyone else remember the Atari 2600 😉

Alot of guns eject spent shells to the right.

I had to shoot righthanded.

You also smear ink when writing.

I’m a leftie but have done things that come naturally with whichever side of the body.

Throw with my left, articulate with my left hand use a tablet pen with my left but a mouse with my right. Wear a watch on my left arm, shoot with my right foot, play the guitar like a right hander etc. etc..

I had tennis coaching when I was about 7-8 but kept getting into trouble as I would switch hand rather than backhand the shot. Coaches didn’t like it but I did as I could smash a forehand with either.

I even studied left handedness and it’s perceived advantages in sport for my final year dissertation at University.

IMO we live in in a right-handed world and us southpaws have to make do the best we can. Whatever comes naturally will be the outcome.

I make live with both hands

Both my (gemini) parents are left handed, my brother and I are right handed and two of my kids (the gemini ones) are both cross domnant (some things left handed and some things right) – means nothing I know but sometimes used in the family to dismiss all Gemini’s as odd

cinnamon_girl – MemberI know this isn’t a right-on thing to say but do wish that I’d been ‘persuaded’ to use my right hand.Wot a struggle with being taught to knit

I taught my daughter to knit using mirrors, she has since taught herself to crotchet right handed . .

And I have completely given up trying to remember who has their cutlery on what side as it changes day to day

On a scarier note a friend of mine managed to remove some of his fingers as the guard on the saw wasnt much use when used in the other hand . . . .

That’s a point, angle grinders and power files are the wrong way around for me, I always have to take more care with them as I’m effectively using them one-handed.

Helluva lot of left handers on here…..disproportionate? To say only 10% of the worlds populus are lefties

Some facts here
http://facts.randomhistory.com/facts-about-left-handedness.html

Point 11- 😯

I’m a lefty for writing only. except for blackboards. (I dunno!)

Right for everything else.. except for
both feet for footy
both hands for painting
both hands for w**king.

Mrs CheeZe is a lot more lefty than me.. worries the hell out of me when she’s got a kitchen knife in her southpaw!

Really want a left-handed corkscrew now.

The hardest thing for me being left handed was to learn to use a chainsaw right handed!

That came pretty natural for me.

Kuco – Member

The hardest thing for me being left handed was to learn to use a chainsaw right handed!

That came pretty natural for me.

It was the urge to use the throttle control/trigger action with my left hand.

Now mastered, thankfully before any accidents, but it did not come naturally for me.

Kuco do you shoot with your right hand too?

This will rarely be an issue in life but I used to have problems using a hand drill as you have to go backwards instead of forwards. I also can’t use a fork and a spoon when eating pasta as I can’t use either with my right hand. Old tin openers were a problem too.

I’m 40 and a leftie. it can be a pain as the world is made for right handers, but you learn to cope fine. my view…don’t get anything much ‘special’ for a leftie, let the child learn to use it /cope rightie, however there are no hard and fast rules. I say learn to cope as often the special leftie tool isn’t around.

however, be understanding and recognize that handwriting, eating with knife and fork and various other simple things you take for granted will seem difficult to a leftie and take a wee bit longer to pick up. we all get their in the end though.

I found / find writing to be the hardest part of being a leftie. Other than that you learn to cope. Lets face it, it’s not really a problem like being vegetarian or ginger.

I think that with most lefties, I’m a little more ambidextrous than most right-handed people. For example, I use a right handed mouse, brilliant for using a PC with a drawing pad and mouse at the same time. I can eat right-handedly and catch / throw with either hand.

A 5 year old boy with very strict Muslim parents was left handed. They came in after school and asked if their son could be encouraged / forced to use his right hand. It was explained to them why not but all the time, I was thinking about how he was very, very clearly gay and the father would forget all about the leftiness in a few years time.

Thinking about the fork and spoon, how do right handers manage then?

fork and spoon is odd. knife and fork = fork in the left. spoon = spoon in the left. fork and spoon…spoon in the left aand wave the fork about uselessly…well that’s me at least.

thing I find the worst is posidrive screws that need to be done TIGHT. try it. I’m sure its easier to drive and twist a rh thread wit the right hand. however I guess I am able to remove tight screws more easily.

Never knew that fact about knives, thanks for that, years of wonky bread slices could be at an end.

I would dearly love feedback on this, please keep me posted.

Can remember back in the day, getting so frustrated that the fire button was on the left, most of the time the fire did not seem to work properly if you were left handed, my excuse for losing so often

I use old-school joysticks with my right hand on the stick and the left frobbing the fire button, but whether that’s instinct or learned behaviour I honestly couldn’t say. Though, a) arcade cabs are configured the other way around, and b) I guarantee my left thumb’s rate of fire will out-shoot anyone ever.

Helluva lot of left handers on here…..disproportionate?

Very interesting question.

Being naturally left handed has totally screwed my co-ordination mojo. Not cos of anything I have done, but because of how I was treated as a kid in schools. and I’m only 40. I remember clear as day in early primary school being told off for drawing my alphabet letters left handed in pencil. always being told off for that. And then being made to look like an idiot cos I couldn’t match the right hand kids with my right hand, despite being a perfectionist with my left hand! WTF!! I felt so left out and wrong and all the other little kids were right. Cos someone said so, and I was a tiny kid. SO now I write/paint’draw right handed. Throw/Kick left handed. Play tennis left handed. Play cricket/golf right handed. I remember going to a new school and we were all lined up to do long jump (something I had never done before) and I just lined up in the big line. totally fecked it up, got laughed at as the new kid. Went to the other line, and aced it, and got really good.. My experience in education has totally buggered my natural born left handedness up. Which makes me a bit sad and angry thinking about it and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has contributed to my feelings of always being a bit of an outsider/underdog/low-self esteem and why I don’t trust authority figures.