II was talking to my significant other this morning over coffee and chanced to mention a fat gentlemen who was often outside our house at 5.00 am in the morning hanging around looking at his phone and leaning on the wall at the corner of our block. We long since learned he was a bus inspector who logged all the “killer” busses that passed. In fact there was nothing sinister about him at all.
My S.O. is in fact not a native english speaker tho she does very well with my laziness and frustration speaking Spanish. As often happens this provoked a discussion of the word “sinister” which I am sure she was uninterested in, but she did a good impression as always, to the contrary.
I jumped to my opportunity to be able to explain the entomology, as I remembered it, that it is from the Latin “sinister” which means “left handed”. This provoked an explication that “dexter” means right handed, from which we get the word “dexterous”. A quick detour into how the TV series Dexter was very entertaining for about six seasons until his sister turned into a killer and the shark was well and truly jumped … with a vaulting pole.
By then I was off to the races, as to how left handed people were discriminated against to the point that they were said to be in league with Satan, and often ( or just once ) burned at the stake. Thru history there have been famous “lefties”, tho I can only think of Napoleon, and Paul McCartney at the moment. Then without need for a lefty rights matter campaign a supply of special left handed products have come to market but to economic factors that you can charge a lot of money to take advantage of such afflicted people.
The classic example is golf clubs, i.e the sticks to play the game. These used to attract a good premium.I was set to wonder what portion of the word population is left handed, and off the top of my head I guess 2%, which I will later check on Wikipedia. From there a list of left handed things.
A tin opener. Not the simple up and down, but the butterfly type.
Maybe a corkscrew is a bit uncomfortable, I’m not sure. (??).
Scissors or anything like ( secuteuse , is French ).
A guitar, as to which I have quite a lot to say. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Jimmy Hendrix spring to mind, and I could say much more on the topic of lefty music, but another time….
A quick visit to Lefty’s the Left Hand Store | Everything for the Left-Hander will give you a basic idea of
what there is. To save you the trouble, there are left handed pencil sharpeners ( and pencils!! ), left handed gloves ( of course… ), left handed cooking spoons, spatulas etc.
So from there I ventured into handedness, and how the mathematical term is “Chirality”, and then onto how I have studied the subject. I have a degree in chemistry, where handedness is of great import, and I could go on about there being more than two hands involved in the situation, which lead on to my postgrad research involving crystallography, and how there are 230 or types of crystal, but no more and no less. This is a mathematical constraint and comes out of space group theory, and how there are only 17 types of wallpaper ( or so theory had it till Roger Penrose got into tiling ). All this stuff fascinating
to me, boring to Magis, anyway, time to take the dogs for a walk.