Word Origin of Sinister

Dexter

I was given this fun fact as a 7-year-old left-hander from my second grade teacher... she was such an encouragement .

Maryn said:

Same here. Were you in my class? I counted myself lucky; kids in the nearby Catholic school got their left hand hit with a ruler until they decided to write with the other hand.

When I went to college, I tried to arrive at class early so I could sit on the right side of the classroom and turn to my left in the seat, using my lap to support my note-taking because the desk surface attached to each chair was right-handed, meaning my arm and a quarter of my spiral notebook was suspended in air.

On a visit there many years later, I saw that classrooms now have a couple of lefty desks. Progress!

Maryn, unrepentant lefty

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I was lucky enough to grow up in a time and place where being left-handed was NBD, but what drove me batty was how they made accomodations in the younger grades and then took away those accomodations as I got older. In high school, there were some left-handed desks floating around, and there was maybe a 50-50 chance of one being in a given classroom, but in college they were as rare as hen's teeth.

The worst, though, were the freakin' left-handed scissors. After first or second grade, they slowly vanished from my classrooms. It's quite painful to use right-handed scissors with the left hand for any length of time, so I ultimately ended up changing which hand I used to cut things. If I was going to have to switch to my right hand anyway, why did they bother accommodating me in the first place? It just made things more difficult later on.