LEFT

Wild Word Friday!

Last week we talked about the word right. In my family, on my dad’s side, every other person is a LEFTy. Therefore, I can’t get by without giving the word, LEFT, equal billing! And in a family where half the people are LEFT-handed, you learn to accommodate. Especially at the dinner table, where elbows have a tendency to collide. My sister (a LEFTy), smart girl that she is, married a truly ambidextrous man. He’s our buffer zone. We can put him anywhere at the dinner table!

I recently ran a poll with my Facebook friends and found that there are a lot more LEFT-handed people out there than I thought. We had 40 righties, 25 LEFTies and 4 ambidextrous – not just the purported 10% LEFTies that you read about. Of course, I already knew that my Facebook friends were an unusual group!

LEFT has a puzzling word history. It seems to come to us from the Anglo Saxon word lyft meaning sky, with the idea of a hand raised toward the sky.

Since in modern times and even not so modern times, the tradition in Europe and in many places in the world is to greet another person with the right hand, the word LEFT as a reference to raising a hand to the sky – a fairly usual gesture of greeting – seems odd to me. Obviously, an obscure tradition has left “fossil” records in our modern language through the word LEFT. I’m picturing opposing groups meeting at a crossroads, right hands on weapons, LEFT hands raised to greet. Hmmm, a mystery. And don’t you just love mysteries?

Are you or anyone in your family LEFT-handed?

Blessings!

Sue

(Photographs from Wikipedia. Some information from Webster’s New World Dictionary and A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in The Principal Indo-European Languages by Carl Darling Buck.)