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Watch an older man sign his name sometime. In a good many of them you will see something that does not sit right. The pen is in the right hand but the hand does not seem to know it. The grip is too tight and too high. The wrist curls. The letters come out cramped and slow, and the whole business takes longer than it should for a man who has been writing his own name for seventy years.

Then watch him pick up a hammer, or a fork, or throw a ball to a grandchild. Left hand. Every time. Easy as breathing.

That man is not a poor writer. He was taught to write with a hand that was not his, by somebody who believed they were doing him a kindness.

I will be straight with you at the start of this one. Nobody can tell you why some people are left-handed. Not me, not anyone. There are ideas and there are arguments, but there is no plain answer, and I am not going to invent one to fill the silence.

What I can tell you is everything around it, and that turns out to be the more interesting story anyway.

What you will learn:

Why handedness is settled before a child is ever born, and is not a choice in any sense
What the figures actually say about it running in families, and why it does not run straight
Why it holds at roughly one person in ten everywhere anyone has ever counted
What the Latin word sinister and the French word gauche originally meant, and what they mean now
Why the word for the correct side and the word for the right hand are the same word in English
What was done to left-handed children in schoolrooms well within living memory
Why writing left to right punishes one hand and not the other, and why Hebrew and Arabic flip it
The reason that strange hooked wrist grip exists, which nobody is ever taught
Why about half of the best hitters in baseball are left-handed, while only about four in a hundred top golfers are
What that gap between two games tells you about tools, and about who gets to be good at anything

And the rule underneath all of it, which my grandfather gave me over a fence rail while I stood in a hayfield correcting a boy who did not need correcting. He said I was straightening something that was not crooked. He said the boy is not fighting you and he is not fighting the grass, he is fighting the tool. Fix the tool.

You straighten what is crooked. You do not straighten what is merely different. And when a person keeps failing at something everyone else finds easy, look hard at the tool before you look hard at the person, because nine times in ten the tool was made for somebody else and nobody ever thought to mention it.

Tell me in the comments if you are left-handed, or if you know somebody older who was made to switch, and what the schoolroom was like for them. I would like to hear those stories while there are still people to tell them. Give me your state and your county with it, because I have a notion this ran harder in some places than others, and I would like to know if that is so.

Next time we look at something you have picked up a hundred times without a thought, which is why bottles come in brown glass and green glass instead of clear, and what those colors are quietly doing.

I have gathered these old ways into a book over at eliasyoder.com if you want them.

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