I was having a discussion with someone last night, and I mentioned that I originally wrote with my left hand, but as a child I was more than encouraged (rather forced) to use my right hand. The whole conversation made me think about the connotations of "left", as it usually always associated with things that were bad... like the Latin for left became 'sinister' and a word like Right became the basis of adroit, meaning Dexterous or deft.

And of course, you never say someone is out in right field outside of a baseball setting or they have two right feet either, nor do you get off on the left foot. And when you go back to the roots of the word left... well, it means palsy. Not to mention the 1600 references to hands in the Bible, most of which are in praise or acceptance of the right hand. This trend also extends to the Koran and the Torah. This deep-seeded idea of left and right even goes down into the subconscious, as demonstrated by the following:

The word left still has negative connotations. Recently a group of college freshmen and sophomores were asked their subjective feelings about the words left and right. Left was represented by bad, dark, profane, female, night, west, unclean, curved, limp, homosexual, weak, mysterious, low, ugly, incorrect, death. Right was thought to be good, right, saved, male, clean, day, east, straight, erect, strong, heterosexual, commonplace, high, beautiful, correct, life.

I am not going to get into the whole thing about the left being feminine/homosexual and right being masculine/heterosexual, because that would be the subject of an entirely different entry in and of itself. It is at this point that I get to the topic at hand, no pun intended. Given the above attitudes(and there are more I could have drawn on), does it not strike anyone as odd or weird(or perhaps fitting) that liberalism became the left side of the political spectrum. The hidden connotations of being on the Left are that you are bad, weak, wrong and so on, and incompetent. Is that really the case? I know some articles have been written on this site that indicate that the Left(as opposed to the Democrats) may be "Morally bankrupt" amongst other things, which was interesting. I mean, that would sort of play upon the idea that the Left was profane rather than righteous... oh wait, there is that darn bias again.

Just can't seem to get away from that kind of language when discussing the issue. Of course, to avoid the bias, I can't use words like correct, alert, regent, regular, rector, region, realm, rich, royal, rule or even dress... as these are all related to the word right in some way. Of course, most of those are things people would aspire to as well. Interesting how that works out. Seems almost like the Right has a natural advantage, doesn't it? Look at all those good words and connotations. 

I guess I understand why I was forced to be right-handed now.....