To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.
Herman Melville: Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
Like many other languages, English has a preference towards right-handed people, and a prejudice against the left-handed in its vocabulary. In early Old English the word riht was used to mean ‘straight, true, proper’ and it can be traced back to Proto-Germanic *rehtaz and the Proto-Indo-European root *reg- ‘move in a straight line, lead, rule, direct’. It is thought that the idea of ‘right-handed’ and the use of riht for the right side of the body stems from the idea that the right hand was the stronger, and therefore more appropriate for manual tasks. Riht was pronounced with a medial /x/, as in Dutch recht and Scots richt, and this pronunciation persisted into Middle English, as indicated by the -gh- in right. Another descendant of *rehtaz is reckon, the semantic link with right being ‘to put in order, square up’. The Day of Reckoning is when all accounts will be settled, and you’ll either end up flying with the angels or being disembowelled by demons. Reckoning is cognate with German Rechnung ‘bill’, again with the idea of ‘calculation, settling up’.
Derivatives of rego ‘rule, guide, govern’, a Latin descendant of *reg- have provided English (often via French) with several other words related to what is right and proper, including rectify, rectitude, direct, correct, erect, rule, regent, regal, regiment, regime, regular, regulation and reign. The name Dexter comes from the Latin word for ‘right’ (hand, side), and from this we have dexterous and dexterity. Again, the right side is associated with skill and if you are able to use both hands equally well, you are ambidextrous – etymologically ‘right-handed on both sides’. On the flip side of this are ambilevous and ambisinistrous ‘left-handed on both sides’, i.e., ‘equally awkward with both hands, butterfingered’. Having two left hands to mean ‘clumsy’ is a common idiom in a number of different languages, including French avoir deux mains gauches, Polish mieć dwie lewe ręce and German zwei linke Hände haben. Although the more common expression in English is have two left feet, as in ‘all the “footballers” in the Sunderland team look as if they have two left feet’, the sentiment is the same.
It is estimated that 90% of humans are right-handed, so for the vast majority of people, the left hand is not as strong as the right. This explains why words for left in many languages often have negative secondary meanings: Sanskrit vāma also means ‘wicked’, Hungarian bal is ‘bad’ and ‘unlucky’, as well as ‘left’, French gauche means ‘skewed’ and ‘awkward’, Dutch links is ‘clumsy’, the closely related German adjective linkisch means ‘awkward, bumbling’, and left itself can be traced back to Old English lyft ‘weak, useless, foolish’. The left side’s association with bad luck can be seen in Greek, Roman and Etruscan augury, whereby fortune-telling was conducted by observing the auspices, the flight of birds. Birds which appeared on the right foretold good fortune, auspicious events, whereas birds flying by on the left gave sinister omens. As well as ‘inauspicious, unlucky’, Latin sinister ‘left’, took on the meaning of ‘harmful, evil, malicious’, and further evolved in English to its most common sense of ‘ominous’.
The prejudice against left-handedness is also present in idiomatic and dialectal expressions. A left-handed compliment, such as ‘you look really nice in this light’, is either ineptly expressed or a surreptitious insult. Some Scottish dialects feature car-handed for ‘left-handed’, car in this instance being a borrowing from Scottish Gaelic cearr ‘wrong, left’. Similarly, Yorkshire dialect has gawk-handed as an alternative to ‘left-handed’. Whether this is due to the influence of French gauche, or gawk is a contraction of gaulick ‘Gaulish’ and so a derogatory reflection of the traditional hostility between the English and the French is unclear. The related gawky ‘awkward, ungainly’ certainly corresponds to the usual maladroit lefty stereotype. Maladroit ‘inept, badly-skilled’, is another borrowing from French, its opposite adroit ‘skilful, resourceful, astute’, coming from à droit ‘to the right; in the correct way’.
The correct way is clearly via the right, rather than the left. If you wake up feeling moody and irritable, you get out of bed on the wrong side, obviously the sinister left side. This idea is echoed in the idiom, common to many languages, of getting up on the left foot: French se lever du pied gauche, German mit dem linken Fuß aufstehen and Spanish levantarse con el pie izquierdo. Making sure you make the right (rather than the left) impression will even affect how new colleagues and acquaintances see you. It’s clear you need to put your best foot forward (the right one) if you are not going to get off on the wrong foot (the left one). Religious and cultural associations have also perpetuated the prejudice against leftness. For several centuries in Britain, being a Roman Catholic was considered to be a highly dubious practice and Irish Catholics, or left footers, were said to dig with the left foot on the spade. Many religions also stipulate that the right hand is for eating, drinking and writing and that the left hand, by contrast, is unclean, and should be used for performing ablutions. Nobody wants to be served by a cack-handed person, or worse still, share a meal or shake hands with them, after all!