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I was in Half-Price Books the other day... (Oh! and I suppose should explain that Half-Price Books is an excellent chain of secondhand book shops which, if you think about it, is not what you'd expect to find in Texas)... anyway... I was in Half-Price Books the other day, and when I was checking out, the chap behind the counter complimented me on signing my name with the correct hand rather than the right one.
Yes he was a member of the left-handed complement, and apparently proud of the fact.
And he was right to be so. We 'lefties' are remarkably brilliant and talented and successful!
Indeed during this essay I propose to introduce the much more appropriate and logical terms 'LH-negative' for members of the right-handed majority and 'LH-positive' for the superior minority.
Now, consider that although LH-positives are one of the smaller minorities (in fact we are probably so far down the list of minorities that it's not till you get to such categories as redheaded sousaphone-playing Latvians that you find a group that's noticeably smaller, and they don't get discriminated against---as far as I know ); although, as I say, we are one of the smaller most disdained of minorities, we are by far one of the most successful.
Just look at the last four presidents, and guess which one wasn't LH-positive: yup! Dubya was the only righty Pres in the last twenty-four years---indeed the only LH-negative one in this millennium, and if that doesn't tell you all you need to know, consider the following list of not-terribly-random, not-particularly-substantiated facts:
Leonardo was of course LH-positive, and cleverly wrote backwards to prove it.
Those left-handed men who attend college (which must be most of us, since we are left-handed) are 15% richer than LH-negative men in a similar position, and 26% richer if we graduate (which must be ditto since we are ditto): though, on a personal note, this doesn't explain why I am not 26% richer than my boss (who, beating the odds, is a righty).
Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have been LH-positive
In spite of our rarity, 20% of MENSA members are left-handed (so either we really are much more genius-y than the rest of you, or we really like joining things).
Einstein was left-handed.
Four out of five of the designers of the Macintosh computer were LH-positive.
Left-handers are ten per cent more likely to pass their driving test first time (and, as another personal note, note that I did this for both car and motorcycle).
Indeed we are so much better at driving almost any vehicle (apart from US Mail delivery trucks) that both Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin and Chewbacca, the Star Wars Wookie, were lefties.
And of course, as must be pretty obvious by now even to the most righty of LH-negatives, and leaving the best till last, and adding yet another personal note, I am myself LH-positive!
Oh! And before any of you forget (in your simple right-handed way) about those POTUSes I mentioned earlier, both major candidates in the last election were non-Dubya-handed, LH-positives!
And when you consider that it's only recently that evil LH-negatives stopped discriminating against us, driving us into hiding our leftness or whimpering about it, by using vile terms like 'sinister' and 'gauche' and 'dexterous' and giving people 'left-handed compliments', and (even worse) by forcing poor left-handed children into inferior right handedness (or at best ambisinistrousness, which is like ambidextrousness, only better) there were probably grillions upon grillions of unrecorded LH-positive geniuses busily improving the lives of their benighted right-handed neighbours: unsung, unloved and (probably) unnoticed.
I suppose it was Nature's Way of weeding out the herd, so that only the very best of us LH-positives survive into adulthood through all the obstacles that jealous right-handers hurl at us: the viciously right-hand scissors, the teaching nuns, the denigration of all that is LH-positive.
Ah!!
No wonder we're so wonderful!
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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