I don’t mean Ambidextrous!
Yesterday I tried cutting a vegetable with the knife in my non-dominant hand and it was a weird and uncomfortable thing. I wonder if there are people who have that distinct discomfort of using your “bad” hand, but on both hands?
I don’t think it would fall under ambidexterity, because that kinda implies someone is comfortable with either hand, but could someone be uncomfortable with both?
I think those people would be labelled as clumsy or lacking motor skills. The brain is pretty good though so with experience it can almost always figure stuff out.
It’s a very interesting question, and I can’t speak to the science but I can speak to my personal experience.
Going back to childhood I always remember the adults insistence that I decide which is my handedness yet knowing intuitively that I could favor either side, and they each had an advantage.
I played left wing in hockey, only because there was never enough left-handed players, so I just pretended I was left-handed.
When I would play little league baseball, coaches would shout at me saying hey, don’t you bat the other way?! To me I just naturally, almost randomly picked a side according to how I felt about the pitcher.
When I played snooker semi-professionally, I shot right handed, but not because my right arm had more finesse, but because my left arm was better at providing rock solid stability with fine control, and because my right eye is slightly stronger. In my life, I played perhaps 50 games of billiards left-handed, out of perhaps 20,000 games total. And I can pick up and play left-handed with ease… You would think I’d been shooting that way my whole life.
I use my right hand to write, but when I skateboard, I skate “goofy foot”. When I destroyed my shoulder and it was a piece of meat hanging off my body for 6 months, I picked up a pen in my left hand and within 3 days I was writing at the same grace I could in grade 6! Within a month I was actually writing better than right-handed. It was still chicken scratch so I’m not sure what that’s worth lol
I know that I am right-handed by choice because there’s a difference in the knuckle/tendon of my left thumb. It makes it impossible to move from certain positions on the “circle” to others without first moving to a transitional spot. And I have more dexterity with my right for that reason alone.
I always wanted to play on P2 of the Street Fighter II cabinet.
Jessica Cox is a certified scuba diver, a light sport pilot, and I think it is safe to say she is without handedness.
What a cool person! Thanks for that link!
Dyspraxia
I mean, depending on the task, I have felt this. There are sometimes things I can’t figure out which hand to use because both feel wrong. Not often. Guitar feels like that for me.
I also read that as we get older, we become less “handed” and it’s not because we become ambidextrous just less dextrous overall, the dominant hand loses dexterity.
I’m left handed, and the topic has come up with right handed people over the course of my life. Living in a world largely built for right handed people forces you to adopt some right handed habits. Wii Sports let you choose your handedness per activity which is helpful to a lot of us southpaws; we legitimately do some things the “right handed” way.
Guitar for example; when I started taking guitar lessons when I was 12, they handed me a normal guitar off the rack with the neck in my left hand and it was instantly comfortable. After a few lessons it came out that I am left handed and “Oh we have a left-handed guitar if you want to try it. Here.” and it felt wrong. Meanwhile I would say just over half, say 54% of the right-handed people I’ve handed a guitar to went “oh no this isn’t right” and wanted to play it the other way. So I’m convinced “normal” guitars are in fact left-handed.
Right handed people often report being strongly right handed and that doing things with their left hand is very difficult. “My right hand is a hand, my left hand is a clamp.” I’ve heard very few left handed people report the same.
I am right-handed, and I tought myself to use my mouse with the left hand when working on my laptop.
The reason for that is that I have a couch, where the ottomane (the “long” part where you can rest your legs on) is attached to the right side (referenced to my seating position), meaning that, when sitting on this side of the couch, the arm rest of the ottomane is to my right side which doesn’t leave enough room to operate the mouse without obstruction.
The side left to me (where the rest of the couch is), is unobstructed and leaves enough room to place and operate the mouse there.
At first, it was hard to navigate with the non-domiant hand, and I used it for navigating within the web browser. The majority of mouse navigation in a browser is scrolling anyway.
After a just a few of weeks I noticed that handling the mouse with the left hand became more and more precisely. Now I use my left hand exclusively with the mouse. I even noticed that when doing stuff in Blender or Affinity for example, keyboard shortcuts are more accessible to me with the right hand when working with a laptop.
When at work however, I use the mouse with my dominant (right) hand, as the desk layout allows me to do that.
People can get used to weirdest stuff. Like my former coworker who uses mouse upside down, like, fingertip grip on the buttons and cord under palm. Said he used to love playing aerial combat simulators, but couldn’t get used to inverted controls, so he just flipped the mouse and learned to use it inverted for everything else. Havent played videogames in decades but it’s still stuck to him. The only problem is that he was a CEO at tech company, but from a passerby perspective it always looked like it’s his first time using a PC.
I’m a leftie and learned the computer right handed. Now I can take notes on the computer and on paper at the same time, don’t have to set anything down. Pretty useful for data entry.
The reason for that is that is… The side left to me (where the rest of the couch is), is unobstructed and leaves enough room to place and operate the mouse there.
Suuuuuuuure buddy, your overly detailed explanation is very believable.
your overly detailed explanation is very believable
I hope so, that’s why the explanation is so detailed.
Are you asking whether there are clumsy people, and people who feel clumsy? Yes, yes there are.
Me playing the piano when I’ve never played the piano
A version of what you are saying is called cross dominance. Where a person is “handed” but users different hands for different things. For example, I write right handed but play sports and shoot left handed. I use left handed scissors but right handed hammer, screwdriver. All of the things feel awkward with the wrong hand but that hand changes with the task.
right handed hammer, screwdriver.
A what now?
I’ve been a carpenter for over thirty years, but I’ve never heard of or seen such a thing, and I can’t even imagine what one would look like. Hammers and screwdrivers are (generally) bilaterally symmetrical.
right handed hammer, screwdriver
Sounds like shit I’ve sent the new apprentice to go looking for when I need a break
[left] handed screwdriver
Vodka and grapefruit? I dunno.
Damn, that’s a better idea than the board-stretcher!
They are saying they personally use their right hand for the hammer and screwdriver, but used the handedness of the scissors instead of just saying their left hand.
Then, they should learn to write more clearly because that arrangement of words does not convey that message.
It was pretty easy to figure out from the context and didn’t need someone who doesn’t know how commas work to get all snarky.
White-knighting for a rando over poor grammar? Wow, Lemmy really is just like Reddit!
Oh boy, you sure told me off!
I’m going to the hospital for all these burns! Sure hope you don’t go and tell everyone or I would be so embarassed!
It’s so hard to find left-handed hammers that I’m sure you just felt forced to do it the other way.
Life hack: Buy two hammers, and mark them with the letters L and R. This way you’ll know which is which.
Before I switched hands I’d just use the right handed one backwards if I couldn’t find a lefty.
How hard is it to hammer in nails with the claw? I always assumed it would be difficult, but seemed too dangerous to try.
It’s the same motion as pulling them but in reverse.
I can see how it would be possible, but difficult. Pulling nails back out, though? Oh, man.
Related to this, but also not really, is how I feel as a right handed person playing guitar.
I mean, sure, the right hand is doing some picking, but the left hand is up there doing all the clever stuff and the right hand has no idea how it manages to do any of it.
I play strings right handed. It seemed weird to me too that the off hand is doing the easy work. Playing left feels wrong like batting right does though. I guess the rhythm is easier to control with the dominant hand and hitting the wrong note/chord doesn’t matter as much when you’re in time?
This makes me wonder if drummers have a dominant hand. Except Rick Allen of course.
I prefer putting my cymbal on a specific side, but I only ever play with a trap set. I don’t know whether that counts.
Ringo is a lefty on a righty kit which added to his feel.
They are so coordinated it’s hard to tell by looking that’s for sure. Keeping time has always been the hardest part for me though so I find drummers and bassists pretty impressive. RIP Phil Lesh
For me, it’s the other way around: I write with my left hand, but I’m right-handed or right-footed when I do sports and I also use tools like a hammer with my right hand.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Btw you can just train yourself to be right or left handed, soviets, in their wisdom, once decided that being left handed is not communistic so children were “re-educated”.
As a lefty who was taught to write with the right hand, 1 I have horrible hand writing, 2 it made me somewhat ambidextrous, but in a real clumsy way. So imo it’s better to not do this.
It taught me to write horribly with both hands 🙃
This practice was not exclusively Soviet. It happened in the rest of Europe too, even long before the Soviet Union, pupils were tought to use their fine hand, i.e. their right, for writing, while their left was bound to their chair.
However, as being left handed isn’t exclusively a matter training, this practice causes drawbacks in other fields.One of my teachers was re-educated that way, from left handed to right handed and he hated it. But he could write mirrored with his left hand perfectly, which was an amazing feat. Sometimes he would write on the chalk board with both hands, the same word but mirrored, that was pretty cool.
Happened in the US too. I had teachers who were forced to use their right hand… With “mixed” results. And by mixed, I mean they switched to their dominant hand the moment it was acceptable, if not sooner
It’s so weird to me that there was once a “correct” hand for writing, people writing with their non-dominant hand would just be so messy. For some reason I have one really vivid memory of learning to write in school, it must have been the very first writing lesson we had. Everyone had a pencil on the desk in front of them then the teacher asked everyone to pick it up, then it was something along the lines of “the hand you just used to pick up the pencil is your writing hand, whenever you write you should use that hand”.
I remember being so anxious about that, what if I’d picked up the pencil with the wrong hand and I’m actually left-handed and forcing myself to write with the wrong hand? It definitely didn’t help that for the entirety of my school life after that my handwriting was awful, barely legible to me and completely incomprehensible to anyone else. In one maths lesson I was even shamed by the teacher in front of the entire class because my 4s and 9s looked too similar so she struggled to mark my work, that was very fun and definitely helped improve my handwriting (/s).
I really am right-handed, I’m just bad with a pencil. After school I went into software so I barely ever write on paper anyway.
I’m sure there was a point I was going to make with this story before I started writing it.
I like to say I’m ambidextrous, because I write equally badly with each hand. I can write like 3x faster with my dominant hand though, it just all looks terrible… My typing is good though, weirdly, so is my calligraphy
I remember my friend helping me find my dominant foot though, it was similar… He threw down a board and told me to jump on. I’m actually a switch with my feet though, the “right” way changes moment to moment but I can switch without relearning from scratch
soviets
Odd way to spell “the Catholic Church”
I have zero knowledge about church but teaccher from that era hit me every time when I tried to write with a wrong hand, so.
Ironically, Jewish history contains several occurrences where the default of right handedness was used to great effect
Awww, I hate I didn’t find this in time to answer since it was in a crossword the other day.
Instead! I’m going to pretend to be a nutter for entertainment.
Yo man, that’s just ambidextrous. Which is cool with me, I got no hate for any sexual orientation, you do whatever and whoever you want, it’s okay, that’s how allah made you.
The closest I can think is someone who is ambidextrous but also dyspraxic.
That would make sense! With how debilitating it would be to struggle with both hands, I guess it would make a lot of sense to classify it as a disorder
I have it, it’s annoying to say the least. I’m not fully ambidextrous though.
Ambidexterity is the word you’re looking for. And yes it exists, but still people will often have a preference because they’re used to using a certain hand for certain tasks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidexterity
As for your question. Being uncomfortable with both hands is basically learning a new task. Like a baby learning to stack blocks.
There’s a word for it.
Ambisinister
https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-day/ambisinister-2021-08-13/
Ahhh I just referred to myself as ambicrap! Thank you for this new word! :)
This is correct, but I prefer damnbidextrous, because I can’t do a damn thing with either hand.
And as an English expression for when you have a penchant for dropping things: “I have two left hands”
Interesting. The word for good with both is related to dextral or right-handed, and the word for bad with both comes from sinister or left-handed.
Well sinister is used to describe anything that’s ‘off’
Awesome, that’s exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!!
I’d have called it antidexterity
Looking at the origin:
ambi, Greek: both;
anti, Greek: against, opposed;
dexter, Latin: right, skilful, clever;
sinister, Latin: left, wrong, evil;So sinister is already anti-dexter, the ambi just emphasises that this not-skilfulness applies to both hands. In German, calling somebody having “two left hands” means that they aren’t skilful at all in handcrafting.
Guess that’s similar to “two left feet” when dancing
Yes, that exists as well.
Did you even read the OP or have they changed it?
They wrote antidexterity, not ambidexterity
My brain just autocorrected it, I guess. My b.
No, ambidexterity is comfort with both hands. Ambisinestrousness is discomfort with both hands.
They wrote antidexterity
Oh I missed that. That’s clever.
anti
