Cack Handed

Day three of the ‘Blogging from A-Z Challenge’  and I continue to struggle with trying to be left handed.  My list of things that I can’t do is growing but I’ll keep these until later.  After all, I have another twenty three days to fill.

It’s a small experiment I know but I want to try and challenge some of the things that I do automatically, without thinking, with a view to creating new experiences and new understandings.  Only though fresh challenges can I realise the boundaries of what I can and cannot achieve.  That’s the thinking anyway.

There are so many euphemisms to describe being left-handed.  Most of them aren’t complimentary to say the least and some are plain rude.  Being cack handed is one of them.  It is an adjective that means being left-handed or clumsy.

I’m told it is from the dialect cack or excrement, from the fact that clumsy people usually make a mess.  Of course the Latin scholars amongst us will know that it comes from the verb cacare, to defecate (caco, cascas, cacat and all that).  It means an awkward or inept way of doing something from cultures that use their right hand to eat and their left to… (I’ll leave you to fill in the rest although I would suggest that if you can pull this off then you can put yourself down as mixed handed.  You just have to remember which hand is which.)

Southpaw is a funny description, originally from boxing but now used in a variety of sports where the player leads with their left.

Other synonyms fall into two camps.  Basically it would seem that anyone who is left-handed is either useless or untrustworthy.  In the first camp you may be considered socially inept as in maladroit, from the old French meaning to be lacking in right-handedness, which has come to mean being unskilful, awkward, crude and tactless.  Or gauche, those French have a lot to answer for, that is lacking social grace, sensitivity or acuteness.  I know many right-handed people who would fall into such descriptions.

Being awkward in itself covers a multitude of sins.  It implies that the person has little skill, or grace, or manners.  The word suggests something that is not well planned and so not easy to use, something or someone who is hard to deal with and should be approached with caution, or even someone who is embarrassing to be with.  Being left-handed can lead to many awkward moments.

The second camp is of greater concern.  Left-handed people may be regarded as dubious, of doubtful quality or questionable propriety, wavering or hesitating in their opinions.  They may be insincere, dishonest and hypocritical but worse than that they are sinister, bad, wicked and threatening.  They are evil.

Humans can be awful.  Any slight variance in a person’s appearance or mannerisms are pounced upon and highlighted to set them apart from the rest.  A quirk of biological fate which may or may not have an evolutionary basis is used to exclude and divide.

I must talk to my colleagues to see how they suffer from such an affliction.