Being left-handed has come a long way. These days it’s even considered the sign of a creative mind. Yet so many questions about left-handedness remain unanswered, from its causes to the meaning of its relationship with autism and Tourette’s syndrome.
For centuries, left-handers were despised and persecuted around the world. The negative attitudes left a legacy in many languages: think of the undertones of ‘gauche’, deriving from the French word for left, or ‘sinister’, which means the same in Latin. Even in Chinese, the word zuo is a synonym for unorthodox or wrong.