Origins

The Right and Left Stuff

by S. D. Liddiard

Dexter was right and he knew it. Now he had to do something about it. For the past three months, he had been watching his next-door neighbour with increasing horror. The man was hatching a sinister plot right under his nose, a vile scheme that would bring the entire block into disrepute. Dexter was no man of action, but he just could not let this happen.

At four o'clock this very afternoon, an unmarked step van had backed into the neighbour's driveway and unloaded a large crate. Dexter knew what was in it. He had been tailing his neighbour each Saturday for weeks, ever since he began to suspect what was going on.

His suspicions began with a seemingly innocent remark over the fence one afternoon in the early spring. Dexter was horrified but did not let on. The next day he repeated the neighbour's words to Rick, his neighbour on the other side.

"You can't be serious," cautioned Rick, "No one would be gauche enough to do that. Not in this day and age. And not here. You must've misunderstood the poor fellow."

"But suppose I'm right," pleaded Dexter, "Then what? We can't let this happen."

"Nah, you're crazy. And even if you aren't, I don't see what we can do about it."

Dexter was on his own. He had followed his neighbour until he saw him make a contact and seal the deal. It was only a matter of time. Today, the merchandise had arrived. Something had to be done.

At midnight the neighbour's lights went out. Dexter waited half an hour. Then, dressed in black and wearing a watch cap, he leaped adroitly over the fence into his neighbour's yard. With a crowbar, he prized the lid of the crate open. He had to stifle a gasp when he saw its contents, but steeled himself to continue. It took all his strength and dexterity to wrestle the monstrosity out of its wooden nest. He gently pressed the lid back onto the empty crate and grappled the object and the crowbar back over the fence. In another 20 minutes, Dexter was driving back home from the country road where he had left the odious item.

There would be no garden gnomes in Dexter's neighbourhood, not if he could help it.

Do you think he was right? Perhaps he was left. It sounds silly to say that someone is left when we mean that they were in the wrong, but we do it all the time when we say someone is sinister, which is Latin for left. We also say that people are left when we mean that they are awkward or tactless, but we say it in French. Gauche is the side on which a Parisian's heart beats.

To describe someone who is skilled, we often use the word adroit, derived from a French adverbial phrase à droit, meaning to right or according to right. We might say such a person has dexterity, from dexter, Latin for right (hand). Someone who is ambidextrous is equally skilled with both hands. This term, from the Latin ambi and dexter means literally right hand on both sides. I think I saw something like that once in a horror movie. (Shudder.)

Why is the right side associated with positive attributes and the left negative? It may have to do with the notion that "might is right" (so to speak). The Oxford English Dictionary defines "right" as the distinctive epithet of the hand which is normally the stronger of the two, among many other things (four pages of definitions, in fact), including the standard of permitted and forbidden action within a certain sphere; law; a rule or canon. It defines "left" as the distinctive epithet of the hand which is normally the weaker of the two. Throughout our existence as a species, the strong have prevailed, have written history, have defined themselves as good.

In this context, I guess you could say that Dexter was right. This would be a left-handed compliment, however, — an insult masquerading as praise. This expression may have originated in an analogy to left-handed marriage, a practice that was widely prevalent among Central European royalty in the Middle Ages. In a left-handed or morganatic marriage, a commoner agreed to forego all claim, by herself and any children, to title or property of a royal husband. In the ceremony, the groom offered the bride his left hand instead of his right, giving rise to the name. Such a marriage was an obvious insult to the bride.

S. D. Liddiard has studied French, German, Latin, Russian, psychology, and linguistics, which have all fed his interest in the English language. To this day, he can lose a couple of hours in an etymological dictionary without noticing the time passing. Despite this, he has only been earning a living at writing for four years.