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?
There’s a word for it.
Ambisinister
https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-day/ambisinister-2021-08-13/
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 concerning handcrafting.
Guess that’s similar to “two left feet” when dancing
No, ambidexterity is comfort with both hands. Ambisinestrousness is discomfort with both hands.
They wrote antidexterity
Oh I missed that. That’s clever.
anti
Did you even read the OP or have they changed it?
They wrote antidexterity, not ambidexterity
Awesome, that’s exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!!
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.
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.
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.
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
It’s so hard to find left-handed hammers that I’m sure you just felt forced to do it the other way.
Before I switched hands I’d just use the right handed one backwards if I couldn’t find a lefty.
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!
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.
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
Me playing the piano when I’ve never played the piano
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.
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.
Are you asking whether there are clumsy people, and people who feel clumsy? Yes, yes there are.
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.
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”.
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.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
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.
soviets
Odd way to spell “the Catholic Church”
Ironically, Jewish history contains several occurrences where the default of right handedness was used to great effect
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.
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 🙃
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.
