Well, I have talked so many times on Countdown about the misfortune of left-hanfers in English, but I've learnt a couple of new things recently, which are to do with left-handers and right-handers, and the first was southpaw, why we call a left-hander a southpaw, and also, of course, it's a left-handed punch in boxing. Well, the baseball term goes back to the orientation of the diamond, which is basically aligned to the points of the compass, which means that the pitcher has his left hand on the south side of his body, and that's what inspired both the baseball term and the boxing term. But there's another one that surprised me, and I have to say I learnt this from the Accidental Dictionary, which is a really nice book written by Paul Anthony Jones, and it was about ambidextrous, because, of course, if you're ambidextrous, that's usually a very, very good thing. It means you can write with both hands. But that literally means, when you think about it, right-handed on both sides, so it's not really something that I'd pondered before. So it means really, that you're skilled and therefore right-handed, again - it's a bit of jibe, if you like, at left-handers. So, that's a literal meaning of ambidextrous, but if you go right back to the 16th century, it actually meant deceitful or double-dealing, so it has a slightly shady past. An ambidexter was a dishonest lawyer, and the idea was that he - it usually was a he - would accept a payment, literally one in each hand, from both parties in a dispute. Today, of course, it only means that you can write with both hands, but it has, as I say, that slightly interesting past. But it, once again, is a bit teasing, if not mocking, towards left-handers out there, so I think we should cetebrate left-handers.
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