It is estimated that approximately 10% of the world’s population is left-handed. It is an apparently irrelevant fact but, for many years and in different cultures, having more skill in the left hand has been a reason for discrimination and social stigma.
We all know stories of left-handed children whose left hand was tied to force them to write with their right. In fact, in English left means left, and it comes from an old word: lyft , which meant weak. No less pejorative is our mother tongue, Latin, which used the word sinister . Such was the superstition and discrimination suffered by left-handers that it is stated that, during the Middle Ages, the Inquisition persecuted them to burn them for considering them servants of Satan. However, it should be noted that there is also no completely reliable documentation to corroborate this fact.
Fortunately, the social stigma no longer exists and, although lefties are a minority, it does not occur to anyone to think that this is a deviation. Moreover, in many cases it is a differentiating element and there are many famous lefties who take advantage of this condition to stand out. One of the clearest cases is that of tennis player Rafael Nadal, right-handed everywhere except on the court, where hitting with the left side gives him a clear advantage over his opponents.
A lot has been said about lefties: that they are more creative or intelligent, that they have a greater tendency to stand out, that they are more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, that they sleep worse, that they live less … most of these statements do not have much scientific basis or they come from studies with numerous biases in the design and analysis of the data. We are going to see some facts and curiosities about left-handers, to meet left-handed personalities from the world of arts and sciences, and also to find out where those myths that circulate about left-handers come from.
