Happy International Left 👈 Handed Day

The first time I picked up a crayon, I used my left hand. My parents were concerned but waited it out. After watching me use my left hand the next few times they decided to convert me.
I was brought to a special Sunday school service where right is right. They started with drawing, then moved on to writing. Eventually they worked on my instincts, by throwing things at me, at random, to ensure I used the right hand to catch. I was slapped with a yard stick in the knuckles whenever I used the wrong hand.
Leftiism exists. Parents think they are helping but it's caused all sorts of problems in my life.
- What in the definition of CIA training is this?
  
  Common practice up to pretty recently.
  
  Religion is mind poison and this is an example of the symptoms.
  
  The word "sinister" is used to mean something evil and conniving, but it really just means "left," whereas "Dexter" is "right," but dexterous is now used to mean very skillful, agile.
- My grandma got her left-handedness beaten out of her by the nuns. Paragons of virtue, the whole lot of them, right up there with Teresa.
- Dad, is that you?
- Use the right hand to catch ... okay but baseball?
- So now are you ambidextrous?
- I wish this was unbelievable. When/where was this? I'm guessing the US and hopefully a long time ago.

Notebook thing dont really make sense?cuz you flip it for the other page anyway
- Panels 2 and 3 happened for me anyway despite not being left handed
  
  I have seen lefties get in on their hand and I always wonder why they don't turn the paper and write towards themselves. That was the hack I learned from early. It also solves the notebook ring problem.
  
  Yes but it happens EVERY time we write in pencil
- Yeah but most of the time if you are just writing a fresh page it’s gonna be in that orientation, especially like back in school where it might be for an assignment or something, so more often than not it would be like that
  
  If you write on front and back pages, it’s equally annoying to righties and lefties.
  
  Binders suck extra bad
- I personally think that its not as much as an issue as thicker notebooks creating an uneven writing surface.
  Being right handed, your hand is supported at the same level as the writing surface until the very end of a line, where you typically leave more space.
  Being left handed, you start every line of writing without your hand being on the same surface as the writing surface, which especially sucks if you have issues with handwriting (which I annecdotedly notice is more common in lefties).
- I flip my whole notebook over and use it back to front. Had a friend buy me one made that way for lefties once as a gift, it was actually really nice to have the cover face the right way for once!
- Was thinking the exact same thing
- Yeah and arguably each person is equally at fault if they are sitting in a way where they bump elbows
- I had a left-handed friend in high-school that just oriented his notebook with the rings on the right (180 degrees rotated).

My favourite part is when people that I've known for a while go "you're left handed?"
- 😂 this happens a lot
- Don't forget those who discover it on a regular basis

I love being married to my left-handed wife. We can cook on the same stove together, we can read and hold hands, we can eat without bumping each other so long as we sit correctly. So many things are easier for us because one of us is a lefty.
- This is absolutely precious lol
  I wish you and your wife unlimited happiness 🥰

And who could forget granny's: when you're left handed, "YOU'RE THE LITERAL SPAWN OF SATAN" ok, dear?
- I’m stumped old people didn’t die on their stupidity.
  
  Eh, living with themselves was punishment enough. I'm just sorry for the few level-headed outcasts who had to live thinking they were weird or pretending to fit in so they wouldn't be persecuted.
  
  Well the plot twist is, they were generally exceptionally smart at what they needed to know to survive. It's easy to forget how difficult life was for average people up until fairly recently. Like less than a century ago. Education and literacy really weren't a priority.
- Since handedness is genetic, there is a chance that that's what she was told when she learned to use the right hand (pun intended)
  
  https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39092/how-did-sinister-the-latin-word-for-left-handed-get-its-current-meaning yea, stupid ideas are contagious and latch onto language and culture, apparently. In Italian, left is still "sinistra", so that creates other fun puns like learning to use the sinister hand.
- Go hang out with some Koreans (possibly other Asian people too), they will think you must be smart because of being left handed.
  
  I think this meme is a Christian thing, although Muslims do reserve their left hand for the filthier things, so there's that coincidence. But in Asia I don't know any such precedent.
- @Gsus4 In my country kids were beaten with rullers on their hands at school until they were able to write right-handed IIRC. Not sure if this brought to them anything else than trauma anyway.
  @sabreW4K3
- I'll gladly be a spawn of satan for people who discriminate over something as handedness
- My grandma is left handed, yes she now can write with both hands because they tried to beat it out of her, they did not entirely succeed.

Every time I do something wrong or I'm clumsy my mother blames it on "it's because he's left-handed" been this way for 36 years now.

I agree with all but the last one. From my experience, I'm the only one NOT noticing how anyone writes while I get "oh, you're left-handed" constantly.
But the smudging part reminded me of something that happened to me:
I had a maths teacher who always had one of us do the homework on one of those overhead projector foil things and show them in front of class. I had a geometry task and would always smear the rewritable pen with my palms, or mess the lines up because I had to hold my hand awkwardly high. He did make me do it over and over again because he thought it was sloppy. My mum tried to talk to the teacher and the principal, that I as a lefty kind of faced an uphill battle there, so having me re-do it when I wasn't able to do it the first time was not really going anywhere. The teacher only told her that I needed to learn ways around my left-handedness. So my mum had me do the homework with a permanent marker. No smearing anymore. The teacher even had a smug face on and was all like "See? You can do it after all". That smugness was gone when he tried to clean up the foil. No one said that he had to like the ways I found to deal with such BS.
- Your detector is off.

I use scissors exclusively with my left hand just to point out to any lefty around that you don't need to buy special scissors.
- As a lefty who didn't get my first pair until my 40's, they aren't necessary but boy do they make cutting on a line WAY easier. Crazy differences in difficulty level for a clean cut.
- It depends, most scissors now are practically ambidextrous. Some though, have really angled interiors of the handles that make them painful to use for an extended duration.
- Using normal, right-handed scissors with the right hand works noticeably better. Cleaner cuts, and you can tell the handle is meant to be held with the right hand. I've used cheap/dull scissors that wouldn't even work with the left hand. Oh man, let me tell you about scissors...
  
  Funny you mention cheap scissors because I've always thought that expensive scissors were more of an issue because they tend to be super specialised and as a result super handed
- 😂
- Aren't most scissors symmetric?
- Every time I use right handed scissors I have Soo many issues, the paper usually folds or rips instead of giving me a clean cut, unless I used a certain part of the scissors to cut and no more. To the point that although it was uncomfortable, I used my right hand to cut things with scissors.
  When I got older I bout myself a dedicated set of left handed scissors.. fucking amazing, I can make clean cuts with my dominant hand utilising the entire length of the scissors, and it works every time.
  And those scissors are now the sharpest scissors in the house because I'm the only one who uses them, the other pairs of right handed scissors in the house are blunt af and barely cut even when I use my right hand.
  
  That's because you are weak. I bet you have a peanut allergy too.

Bottom left panel - writing from right to left?
- no, it's just squiggly lines, no writing on that paper.
- When you write you accumulate graphite dust or ink onto your hand. Even if you lift your hand between words, the movement of your hand resting on your previous letters makes it happen.
- Thats arabic
  
  Doesn't that turn the point of that panel null though? I thought that the point was that you get your hand dirty because, when writing from left to right with your left hand, you're more likely to stomp over what you've already written.
- The rest of that line could just be concealed by the hand

Where is the love for all of us ambidextrous folk out there
- Everyone loves the privileged all the time!
- Had a friend who got a lot of attention for being ambidextrous.
  He wanted to be left alone
- MUTANT
- Nowhere - everyone hates us because we're too busy fucking with what hand we do sports with
  Alternatively, nowhere because you just kinda still end up functionally right handed anyways because everything's built that way and it's easier to just go with the flow even if you can technically use either hand.
  
  I mean, the word ambidextrous means "both right", so by their own definition they're even more right-handed than righties.
  
  Yeah I didn't even really know I was ambidextrous until I was like 15 or 16. I discovered I could write with both hands, and I started doing a bunch of stuff left handed and found out it was pretty easy for me.
  Then my dad told me that when I was a little kid I played hockey shooting both ways until I chose shooting left. And he said I always did everything both ways. Just took me until a little later in life to discover on my own.

As a left-handed person I resent being called out like this.
- 😂

I can relate to the bottom left image.
My first language is Arabic, which reads from right to left. I am right handed. As such, my hand gets covered in ink.
- I get this in english. Easiest way to avoid it was to tilt the page at an angle.
  
  Not hard at all.
- Shukran

It is advantageous in ancient combat though. When everyone is carrying a shield with their left hand and their sword on their right hand, the leftie can strike their relatively unprotected opponent's right shoulder, unless the opponent is in formation and has an ally to its right.
- The opponent can just as easily strike one's unprotected left shoulder though.
  
  But the leftie is more accustomed to fighting right-handed opponents than vice versa.
  
  Lefty trains against right handed people, but it's not the same in the other way
- Also helpful when storming a tower; spiral staircases are generally spiralled to give a right-handed defender the advantage against a right-handed attacker
- But as long as neither you nor your opponent plan to fight in formation, it's all good! This "fighting in formation" thing probably isn't going to catch on.
- unrelated but i also found it to be an advantage in table tennis
  
  I've played against a lefty a few times, it's so awful it feels unfair lol

Handedness doesn't really matter, it's all about how you were taught (or weren't) to do things. For example, my brother is left-handed, but he uses a mouse in the right hand. I'm right handed, but I'm holding the fork in the right hand.
- I hold a mouse in my right too. But that's because most mice are designed for right hands.
  
  Im right handed but use mouse with left.
  
  Most mice are symmetric. Only more expensive ergonomic mice have handedness.
- I'm left handed, and I use a mouse with my right hand since I was 11 (now I'm 35) because my two brothers are right handed.
- It's not that simple either though. Yes, I do play the guitar with my right hand and I use computer mice with the right hand. This doesn't change the fact that writing with the right hand is incredibly stressful to my brain and right-handed scissors do not work in my right hand either. Handedness is more like a default setting: You can change the setting to the other hand, but you will have to make an conscious effort to do so every time a new motor skill is learned. I refused to learn computer mice with my left hand because that's just not where mice where in computer rooms and at friend's houses and such. I refused to learn left-handed guitars because then I wouldn't be able to play any other guitar than my own. That's not "doesn't matter" that's "deliberately put in the effort to override the brain".

The second one is stupid though... The rings get in the way 50% of the time regardless of handedness. If you are right handed, writing on the back of the page sucks. If you are left handed, writing on the front sucks.

Just write upside down.
- Hax

Huh, was it just me always getting super dirty hands when writing despite being right-handed? I even thought it looked kinda cool with that metallized skin color

I hate number 3 with passion. It happens to me all the time, you know, a leftie. I'm a leftie everyone! Isn't being leftie the best thing in the world? Man we are the bes...

I'm left-handed and I relate to none of these
- I'm not left-handed and I constantly point out lefties in movies and tv shows to my partner.

I'm right-handed but trained myself to use my computer mouse left-handed due to elbow pain. It is so awesome to jot notes w my right hand while mousing with my left.
- @Gee2oo40 @sabreW4K3 as just a Basic lefty I agree. Very neat and I don’t have to use a computer a different way than my muscle memory allows
  
  Even though I'm a lefty, I've always moused with my right hand. Mainly because in school, I often wasn't able to move the mouse to the left hand, because they locked the cable to the PC and to the desk in a way that only left you so much cable length, so you couldn't physically move it any more then was required to use it.
  Stupid assholes stealing mouses, always gotta ruin it for us lefties.
  
  It took me a long long time to get comfortable mousing with my left hand. I usually dock my laptop so that I have a full-sized mouse & KB. But when I use the laptop by itself, I forget how to right-click because of the ambidexterity of it all.

Even tho I am right-handed, I can relate to the top left pic. For some reason, I started eating like a left-handed person when I was little and now it's weird to do it the correct right-handed way, so I won't change it.
- In my country the 'correct' way to eat is to hold the knife in your dominant hand and the fork in your off hand. I have always maintained that that's wrong. You keep one utensil close to your plate, and jab the other towards your face. Which one do you want in your most favoured hand?
  
  Yea, here in Germany, the "correct" way is also to use the knife with the dominant hand. Will Never understand this. I use the fork with my dominant hand till I'll die and no one will ever stop me!

Hey lefties, how do you feel about the right-hand-ification of Link from The Legend of Zelda?
- don't care in the slightest. Why would I? I write with a different hand than most people, I'm not some kind of suppressed minority in need of media-representation.
  
  No go on, let's run with it, it's really funny.
- I don't care much, but it is too bad that they've made him a bit more of a blank slate. Makes him a little blander.
- I'll always have "A Link to the past" in my memory, and some other derivatives from that game.

The first three definitely. The last one not at all.

I solve problem 2 by flipping my notebook upside-down. Reading my notes back is a little more annoying but I'm not in physical pain while writing, so I consider it a win

Yaaay more comics in the meme sub
I do so love reading the meme strips in the paper, or going to the meme book store...
- c/gatekeeping
  
  c/thereisacommunityforcomics
  Shove off.

Ha, yeah let's turn left-handed into an identity category. Why not, fuck it.
- Who talked about identity? Left-handed people is just a group, right-handed is also a group and ambidextrous is another one. This post is only noticing the difference in day-to-day life with right-handed people, that's it.
  
  Me, I did. I said "let's turn left-handed into an identity category".

- Inferior how? Those are minot inconveniences
- Not as meritorious as you, who are working hard on publishing your dumbfuck comments for everyone else to suffer secondhand embarrassment.