I think I’m left-handed, but I can’t quite remember. I haven’t actually hand-written anything since about 2008, when the last smartphone-free human was exiled by society and sent panicking into the wild to carve tweets on a tree. Gradually, as we type more, the issue of choosing “which hand” to write with will fade. They’ll probably release an app in a few years that even gets Siri to wipe your bum too.
One thing I don’t miss as I reluctantly become integrated into my keyboard, like some forgotten PC accessory that’s grown a beard, is the dip in frequency with which I hear the expression, “Oh you’re left-handed? I hadn’t noticed.” An irksome interaction that suggests you’re keeping some sort of hand census, and that this vital piece of information had somehow got by one of your pervy informants.
I sometimes wonder if it’s similar remarks that caused Jimi Hendrix to set fire to his guitar. “Ooh, you play left-handed, I hadn’t noti- OK I’m sorry!” Keyboards are my camouflage against the manually obsessed.
A fascination with our favoured extremity might be more useful than we previously thought, as a recent study into the effects of left-handedness has made some intriguing findings.
“Left-handed individuals show consistently lower cognitive skills and higher rates of mental and behavioural disabilities,” writes Joshua Goodman in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Admittedly, most people would show lower cognitive skills if they spent their first 17 years fixing the smudged nonsense caused by a writing system that involves your hand immediately undoing the hard work of your pen. Children with iPads in schools will never know my frustration at producing an ink-smeared essay that could easily be mistaken for the manifesto of a clumsy squid.
Goodman has further bad news: “The empirical evidence for greater creativity among the left-handed turns out to be fairly weak.”
So not only are we sinister types probably not very clever, we can’t even fall back on the usual trade-offs of being arty and creative either. What next? The left-handed can’t tell anecdotes? They’re scientifically bad in bed? It turns out the final blow is financial, with lefties receiving “10–12% lower annual earnings than righties”, apparently due to their focus on jobs with less emphasis on cognitive skill.
There isn’t much consolation for all of this. Some might point to the fact that Barack Obama is left-handed, but I’m not sure that’s comforting any more when you consider the fact that he’s more likely to have “emotional and behavioural problems [and] learning disabilities such as dyslexia”. I mean, does he even know what he’s signing? Does Obama know he’s signing off on drone strikes?
I think shunning ink and sticking to the keyboard might be a good plan. It means I can avoid the “I hadn’t noticed” conversation and ensuing violence, but also I don’t want people now saying, “You’re left-handed? Oh dear. You’re probably stupid and poor. Want to borrow a fiver?”
