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Theodore Roosevelt
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Federal Government Cutting to the Bone?
Handedness
I might have normally saved this item for my Journal format posts. (Few videos showed up in my feeds.) Familiar readers know that I'm a natural southpaw (the only one in my nuclear family, although two of my goddaughters, both nieces, are), but there are nuances: when I played youth baseball, I could throw with either hand and actually threw harder with my right (there are only a few switch pitchers in MLB, e.g., Pat Venditte). Moreover, I mostly threw a football with my right hand and batted right.
I was in Sam's Club the other day and signed my credit card agreement, and the cashier said, "A lefty! I don't see many of those." Coincidentally, I ordered a left-handed accessory assortment from a company in Great Britain which arrived over the weekend.
But recently at work, there were five of us in the office--4 of whom were lefties. The other, a lady, mentioned she was also a born lefty but converted over pressure from her own natural left-handed Mom. We make endless acquiescences to a right-hand dominant world--you name it, scissors, corkscrews, etc.
I'm in an even more selective subgroup, along such southpaws like Obama and Prince William: with an inverted or hook writing style (about 30% of southpaws). During my school years, the left edge of my hand was typically smeared with pencil lead or ink stains by the end of the day.
This Canadian source (1978) confirms for a large population that 'inverted writing' is actually very common among left handers:
"Abstract - A survey of writing positions of left-handers in a sample of 5910 school children was conducted. There were significantly more male than female left-handers with an inverted writing position. There was a significant change in the incidence of left-handers with an inverted writing position over the six elementary school grades sampled with a much higher incidence in grades five and six than in the lower grades. The incidence of left-handers with an inverted writing position over all grades was 40% for males and 29% for females. For grades 5 and 6 the incidence was 59% for males and 43% for females."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11516440 (2001)
"Abstract - Among 1848 young men appearing before the Danish draft board, 232 (13%) were left-handed. Of these, 118 (51%) used an inverted, or hook-like, writing posture, 49 (21%) used a non-inverted posture and the remaining 65 (28%) could not be categorized. There were no differences between left- and right-handers on a battery of four cognitive tests. However, inverted left-handers performed significantly or near-significantly better than the non-inverted left-handers on two of the four tests and significantly better on the total score for the test battery. These results support the contention that the inverted posture is adaptive for left-handers and suggest that it may be more likely to be adopted by those with better cognitive abilities. Our findings conflict with earlier reports from two decades ago, however, and the association may therefore be socially and culturally dependent."
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| Courtesy of ireadhands |
See this summary from Wikipedia:
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: Christmas Favorites
Bruce Springsteen, "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town"
