Left-Handers Day is on August 13

Wazzup Pilipinas!

Happy Left-handers Day!

My daughter is left-handed - only one in our family - but she excels in everything she does. Although she a little hard-headed and with a bit of a temper every now and then, her positive traits outweighs all those negative shortcomings.

What I like about her is her creativity in drawing or sketching anime characters. She maybe a leftie but she draws really well!

When she was really young, after discovering that she was a leftie, my wife and I even tried to correct the way she writes. We wanted to teach her how to write using the right hand thinking that it was very difficult for her to grow up using the left hand. We couldn't even teach her how to write during her preparatory years  because my wife and I were both right-handed. Even her teachers were all right-handed so they couldn't tutor her well.

But to our surprise, she grew up to be a very bright student. She was always on the pilot section of her schools (yeah, schools because we had to transfer from one home to the next due to my line of work back then that required us to change address almost every year), and she learned how to play the organ on her own (with a little guidance from those YouTube training videos) aside from her skills in drawing.

Both skills (to play the organ and draw) require her hands as an indispensable tool yet she managed to become good at it despite being a leftie.


I've read that some groups designated this day, August 13, as International Left-handers Day. (The crazy but awesome things they do these days)

"It is meant to promote awareness of the inconveniences left-handers face in a right-handed world, but also point out the advantages of being left-handed.


The English word "left" is believed to come from the Anglo-Saxon word “lyft”, which means "weak" or "useless". Similarly, the French word for left, “gauche”, is also used to mean "awkward" or "tactless", and “sinistra”, the Latin word from which the English word "sinister" was derived, means "left". On the other hand, the words for "right" and "correct” have the same origin in many languages.

Left-handers make up around 7-10 % of the world’s population. No significant left-handed culture has ever been known in the world. Interestingly, animals also show preferences for one side of their bodies."


Here are more interesting facts sourced from social media networks that I would like to also share with you:

Scientific Left Handed Facts

1. Make up between 5% and 10% of the population (depending on who you ask)
2. More likely to have allergies
3. More prone to migraines
4. More likely to be insomniacs
5. Use the right side of the brain the most
6. Three times more likely to become alcoholics – the right side of the brain has a lower tolerance to alcohol!
7. More likely to be on extreme poles of the intelligence scale
8. Tend to reach puberty 4 to 5 months later than right handers
9. More likely to suffer stuttering and dyslexia
10. Twice as likely to be a man
11. Better at 3D perception and thinking
12. Better at multi-tasking
13. Live on average 9 years less than right handed people
14. 39% more likely to be homosexual

Interesting Left Handed Trivia

1. Make especially good baseball players, tennis players, swimmers, boxers and fencers (almost 40% of the top tennis players are lefties)
2. Celebrate left handed day once a year – August 13th – International Left Handers Day
3. Draw figures facing to the right
4. Recover from strokes faster
5. More likely to pursue creative careers
6. Of the seven most recent U.S Presidents, 4 have been left handed
7. Left handed college graduates go on to become 26% richer than right handed graduates
8. On a QWERTY keyboard there are 1447 English words typed solely with the left hand, whilst only 187 are typed with the right hand.

Bizarre Lefty Titbits

1. Adjust to seeing underwater quicker
2. Less able to roll their tongue than a righty
3. Nails grow faster on the left hand than the right (fingerpicking advantage anyone?)

*Source : Chicken Soup for the Soul and InterNations

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