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in our schooldays, how many of us didn't learn to tell left from
right by thinking the right hand was right to write with and
the left hand was what was left?
The notion that right is 'right' seems to have been deeply rooted in Western culture for a very long time. Elsewhere too — throughout Africa and South Asia the right hand is used to handle food, while the left hand is reserved for less clean activities.
According to Norman Lewis in his now classic vocabulary builder Word Power Made Easy, "the right hand is traditionally the more skillful one; it is only within recent decades that we have come to accept that 'lefties' or 'southpaws' are just as normal as anyone else — and the term left-handed is still used as a synonym of awkward.”
Even at the time of the Roman empire, dextra, the Latin word for right or right hand, appears to have had the added connotation of handy or skillful. These favorable qualities eventually found their way into English as the noun 'dexterity' and adjective 'dexterous'.
In his book, Lewis contrasts Latin dextra with the corresponding word for left, sinistra, which English has inherited as the adjective 'sinister' depicting something threatening, evil, or dangerous. Could this negative association be part of the reason for our historical bias against left-handed people?
The French word for left, gauche, has similarly been borrowed into English with uncomplimentary meaning. A person characterized as gauche completely lacks finesse. A gauche remark is tactless, a gauche expression of sympathy bumbling and embarrassing. The noun 'gaucherie' is social clumsiness.
Conversely, the French word for right, droit, forms the basis of our highly positive English adjective 'adroit'. Like 'dexterous', 'adroit' denotes skillfulness, particularly in the use of mental faculties. An adroit person is sharp-witted and intelligent, an expert at handling tricky situations smartly and ingeniously. The matching noun is adroitness, the very opposite of gaucherie.
Author and 'vocabularian' Norman Lewis adroitly and dexterously avoids any mention of leftist or rightist politics in his 560-page treasure trove of etymological information.
