MEEKER | What you see pictured is not too hard to figure out: a toddler’s spoon for eating all that yummy Gerber pureed squash. So, look a little closer and you will notice that little Johnnie can only hold it in his right hand.
Randy Ridgeway, who used this spoon as a child, explained to me that the spoon was made in Germany and was curved purposely to force children to develop right-handed skills. Randy was born on his father’s U.S. military base. I won’t tell you the year, I will say that it was after WWII, or maybe WWI? Randy explained that Germans of that era were still clinging to strong preferences for blonde, blue-eyed, right-handed children.
Bias against left-handed people goes way back in many cultures. Even when I was a kid, teachers were still pushing kids to write with their right hand. It didn’t matter much when we were still block printing letters, but later cursive writing was a challenge using the left hand. The 20th century cursive letters are looped and curved to accommodate a metal tipped pen dipped in liquid ink. The pointed tip was split in such a way that downward pressure would yield more ink flow and a bolder line. The sharp point also made it hard for a pen held in the right hand to make a vertical upstroke without the pen tearing the paper. The solution was to make slanting upstroke motions from left to right. Try to mimic that motion with your left hand and you will see the problem.
Leonard Da Vinci, the super genius, could write with his right or left hand and would sometimes write in such a way that the reader would have to hold it up to a mirror to decipher it. He could even write in Italian!
Most of us lesser geniuses are left-brain dominant, which means we are more likely to favor our right hand. I had a friend who often pointed out that he and other left-handed people were the only ones in their right mind. Modern lefties have it a little easier. We make left-handed scissors, kitchen tools, guitars, pens, mugs, and T-shirts that read, “I may be Left-handed, but I am always Right!” The world is still waiting for a left-handed screwdriver.
