You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Related Stories. America Needs to Get Back to Facts. Already a print subscriber? Another recent study has demonstrated an increased cognitive flexibility among the ambidextrous and the left-handed—and lefties have been found to be over-represented among architects , musicians , and art and music students as compared to those studying science.
Part of the explanation for this creative edge may lie in the greater connectivity of the left-handed brain. The explanation could also be a much more prosaic one: in , a group of Connecticut College psychologists suggested that the creativity boost was a result of the environment, since left-handers had to constantly improvise to deal with a world designed for right-handers.
Strongly handed individuals, both right and left, were at a slight disadvantage compared to those who occupied the middle ground—both the ambidextrous and the left-handed who, through years of practice, had been forced to develop their non-dominant right hand.
Whatever the ultimate explanation may be, the advantage appears to extend to other types of thinking, too. In a study of students who had scored in the top of their age group on either the math or the verbal sections of the S. Among those who had scored in the top in both the verbal and math sections, the percentage of left-handers jumped to nearly seventeen per cent, for males, and twenty per cent, for females.
That advantage echoes an earlier sample of elementary-school children, which found increased left-handedness among children with I. Michelangelo and da Vinci were left-handed, after all. Note phrases like "right hand man" describing someone you rely on. Finally, a large percentage of leaders seem to be left handed for reasons I cannot fathom , so perhaps sinister meaning evil has some root in people's criticism of those with power?
Theory goes, left-handers have an advantage in battle everyone has fought and trained against a right hander. Those that won, and had good political skills got to rule and remain ruling and reproduce, so it was self selecting for leadership. The parallel is carried on by other words. A popular maxim found on refrigerator magnets says that if the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handed people are in their right minds.
In spite of that observation, the linguistic bias against the left side, and left-handedness in particular, is entrenched in English and many other languages, and likely will never go away. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. What to Know Sinister , today meaning evil or malevolent in some way, comes from a Latin word simply meaning "on the left side.
More Words At Play. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Oct.
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