Now in its 17th year, the day is celebrated with right- and left-handed sports matches, left-handed drinking events and other activities, the club says.
It is based on the Latin word “sinistra”, for “on the left.” But as time went on, it began to gather associations with evil that persists today.
Throughout the centuries, left-handedness has been associated with weakness, impurity, and evil. Nowadays, some would consider the left-handers in our midst evil, but they must endure various disasters of a right-handed world.
Lefty stats
About 10% of the world’s population is believed to be left-handed, despite the number of ebbs and streams with time and space, researchers say. In more free-wheeling times and cultures, researchers say, left-handedness is more common, although in more restrictive times and places, the incidence seems to decrease.
Lefty careers
In a 1996 study, researchers at Harvard Medical School found that orthopedic surgeons, librarians, and mathematicians were mostly right-handed, while lawyers and architects, as a group, were “less right-handed than left-handed.” Other studies have shown that there are more left-handed people working as artists and musicians and in university institutions. Interestingly, more than 20% of the Apollo astronauts were lefties, according to NASA.
Left presidents
Politically separate, at least four of the past seven presidents have left-wing: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George HW Bush and Gerald Ford.
Ronald Reagan also frequently appears on the list of left-handers, although he wrote with his right hand. Some historians suggest that he was born left-handed, but forced to change as a child.
Why are so many American presidents left-handed?
There is no clear investigation, and it may just be a fluke.
But the website leftrightwrong.com outlines some of the theories: Politicians are often lawyers, a profession that ranks among the highest concentrations of left-wingers; lefties are mentally more resilient because of all the oppression they have to endure in a right-handed world; lefties have the reputed ability to process language on both sides of their brains.
Lefty income
Research suggests that left-handers may have high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, schizophrenia and may even die prematurely. It turns out that they may also get the short end when it comes to revenue, according to 2014 study.
Economist Joshua Goodman of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government found that lefties’ incomes were 10% to 12% lower than those of right-handed people.
This is fully in line with a 2006 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, in which economists from Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University found that “among the fellow-educated men in our sample, those who report that they leftists earn 15 percent more than those who report being right-wing. “
The same was not true for airborne women, they said.
This piece was first published in 2015.
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