Left Out of Righties' World and Handed a Shortened Life of Woe : Life spans: One researcher says left-handed folks live 9 years less than righties. But the sinistrals won't be left out of this backhanded fight.

By JULES LOH

July 19, 1992 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Our text today is from the Book of Jonah, Chapter 4, Verse 11:

“And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand . . .”

On the other hand, brethren, some very irritated American people, perhaps 15% of the population, might consider Nineveh’s ambidexterity a saving grace.

They are the left-handers and they have a gripe. Is not life in a right-handed world irritating enough? Must they be discriminated against in death as well? Lefties have now been told, you see, that they are likely to meet their Maker nine years sooner than righties. Never mind the Ninevites, Lord, pity the southpaws.

Lefties are long accustomed to gloomy lore about sinistrality, the term the experts use for left-handedness. But that shorter life span statistic is particularly unsettling. Its source is a recent book, “The Left-Hander Syndrome,” by Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.

“Actually,” Coren said on the phone from Vancouver, “I’ve received some quite positive mail. Not from left-handers but from neuropsychologists. They found it interesting.

“Left-handers really should thank me. The book makes it clear that many left-handers’ accidents result when they use equipment designed for right-handers. Accidents account for about half of the early left-hander deaths, and many of those causes can be corrected.”

Any left-hander who has knocked over an electric iron because the cord sticks out the wrong side, or pinched a finger using right-handed scissors, or scraped a knuckle by having to push rather than pull the thumb lever on a file drawer, will say amen to that.

But a nine-year-shorter average life span is another matter. Five researchers questioned by The Associated Press were unconvinced. All said they wanted to see the study duplicated before they would buy it.

One, Alan Searleman of St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., called the finding “outrageous.” Someone, he said, would have noticed such a startling discrepancy long ago.

So you might think. From the beginning of recorded history, lefties have not exactly gone unnoticed.

Ancient Tarot cards show a left-handed devil. A left-handed blessing is a curse, a left-handed compliment is dubious at best. The Latin word for left is sinister. The heraldic slash, the bar sinister, is the mark of a bastard. The Ayatollah Khomeini wrote that the Shah of Iran obviously was cursed by Allah because his son was left-handed. Lefties have been regarded as agents of so many evils through the ages that some wizard surely would have divined before now that they also die sooner.

If they do, the fact has eluded not only sorcerers and scientists but also those who study longevity from a bottom-line point of view: life insurance underwriters. A nine-year longevity difference would put lefties in the same category as two-pack-a-day smokers. Yet not one company could be found that even asks the question.

Neither does the Institute for Highway Safety concern itself with laterality, or sidedness (there is no simple word for it), even though Coren says left-handers are more susceptible to fatal accidents by 7.9% vs. 1.5%.

Coren will get no argument, though, about his observation that left-handers appear more accident-prone, fumbling as they must with things as ordinary as the drinking fountain in the park, the ice cream scoop in the kitchen, the pencil sharpener in the classroom and the coin slot on the bus. In bygone days left-handers were even at perilous disadvantage on the field of honor: There were no left-handed dueling swords.

The trouble today is, in all the land only about two dozen shops (a few with thin mail-order catalogues) cater to lefties groping for a proper measuring cup or butter knife or fishing reel or spiral notebook. As for big ticket items such as cameras and violins, and potentially dangerous ones such as power saws and drills, forget it.

Some products would take only slight modification to become, as it were, evenhanded. Would it not be just as easy to put the numbers on all four corners of playing cards, for example, so lefties can fan out a hand, too?

After all, manufacturers have gone to considerable trouble on behalf of righties. Take buttons. Clothes button in a way that is natural for right-handed men and, by happenstance, left-handed women. That’s because of outworn noblesse oblige. Men button themselves up; a maidservant, of course, buttons up milady. The incidental convenience was intended not for left-handed women but right-handed servants. Doesn’t everyone have a maidservant?

Lefties as a group are convenienced, it seems, only when there’s no getting around it, as at a toll booth.

But if lefties expect Stanley Coren’s book to improve their lot when left-handed movers and shakers over the eons have not done so, they’re out in left field. Which is to say, nuts.

Lefty Ben Franklin’s treatise on the subject yellows in library attics. Caesar, Napoleon, Ramses II, Charlemagne, all lefties, might have ended right-handed bias by edict. Albert Einstein by logic. Clarence Darrow by argument. Cole Porter with a melody. Billy the Kid with a threat. Babe Ruth and half the Baseball Hall of Fame by role modeling. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles could advance the lefty cause charmingly, Jay Leno wittily, Norman Schwarzkopf boldly. Now come Bush and Clinton, sinistrals both. Will they stand together on a Left Rights platform? Hardly.

Some others who have left a sinistral mark:

Alexander the Great, Queen Victoria, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Joan of Arc, the Boston Strangler, Bach, Oliver North, Ravel, Whoopi Goldberg, Harpo Marx and Lloque Yupanqui. Lloque, known descriptively as The Ugly, ascended to the throne of the Incas in the late 12th Century. His name means “Unforgettable Left-Handed One.”

Stanley Coren and a fellow psychology professor, Diane Halpern of California State University, first published their death-rate findings in a scientific journal 1 1/2 years ago; the recent hard-cover book drew public attention to it and other gloomy findings.

Their paper was one of more than 100 laterality studies published in the past 20 years. Various of them tended to find that lefties are more likely than righties to have reading problems, immune system disorders, wet the bed, itch, become neurotic, alcoholic, commit suicide, go to jail--so many deviations from the norm that Coren concludes left-handedness is in essence pathological, that is, has the characteristics of a disease.

The way Coren discovered the mortality discrepancy annoyed his critics as much as the finding. He sent postcard questionnaires to the next of kin listed on the death certificates of 2,875 people in two California counties. He based his finding on 987 usable responses.

“He shot himself in the foot this time,” said Suzan Ireland.

Ireland is the feisty editor of Lefthander Magazine, a publication of Lefthander International, based in Topeka, Kan. She and Coren have clashed before; she calls him and Halpern “The Dextral Duo.”

“Elsewhere in Coren’s book,” she said, “he writes about ‘the invisible left-hander,’ making the point that most right-handers don’t even notice whether someone is left-handed.

“He backed up that observation with a previous study. In 1972 he asked 159 high school students whether their parents were right- or left-handed or didn’t know. Then he asked the parents. Here are the results in his own words:

“Fifty-six percent of the left-handed parents went unnoticed by their young adult children. In every single case when a parent’s handedness was reported wrongly by their child, a left-handed parent was reported to be right-handed.

“So how does he come up with this so-called longevity finding? By using a methodology which he himself found unreliable.”

If the survey sample did report erroneously that some lefties were really righties, says Coren’s associate, Diane Halpern, it would tend to narrow the longevity gap, not widen it.

At least one researcher, Dr. Charles J. Graham, used a less controversial “case-controlled” method to study the frequency of accidental injuries among lefties. Graham is an emergency room physician at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.

He and four colleagues tracked 761 patients age 6 to 18 who arrived at the emergency room. They were divided between those who were there because of trauma, or accidents, and those for medical complaints. Of 267 trauma patients, 16.5% were left-handed, and of the medical group only 10.5%.

They also asked the parents of the patients if the child had ever been hospitalized for an injury. Of those who had, 19.7% were lefties, 12% righties.

“Not an overwhelming risk factor,” Graham said, “but significant.” As for the Coren mortality study, Graham said, “We need more research.”

So it appears at this point that researchers do not totally agree on what left-handedness causes--or, for that matter, what causes left-handedness.

Some stress a genetic link to left-handedness, others don’t. Many attribute it in part to subtle brain injuries before or during a stressful birth. In any case, even if a child can be trained to use the other hand it is only a superficial switch. The brain remains wired the same way.

In China and Taiwan today, virtually every lefty learns to write right-handed, such is the social stigma of sinistrality. In ancient Japan it was grounds for divorce.

Many older lefties in America have painful memories of parents cajoling them and teachers punishing them to force them to change hands. That practice seems to be losing favor nowadays, but no child escapes the snide put-downs of lefties in language and lore.

Just as Latin gives us sinister, so the Latin word for right, dexter , gives us dexterity. There isn’t even an evenhanded word for neither-handed; ambidextrous literally means both-right. The Spanish word for left-handed is zurdas , which means wrong way. The German word also means clumsy, the Italian word means dishonest and the Japanese word means heavy drinker. In French, gauche , left, means tactless; a droit , to the right, means agile.

On playing fields, though, there’s nothing maladroit about lefties as anyone knows who has seen a southpaw lay down a drag bunt and be two steps toward first when the ball hits the bat.

Southpaw? That’s the direction a pitcher’s left arm points when he looks west at the batter, which was the way Chicago’s West Side Ballpark was laid out when a local sportswriter, Charles Seymour, coined the term in 1891.

It’s against the rules to play polo left-handed, so Prince Charles just has to make do. Baseball bats and tennis rackets are without bias, though, and lefties win trophies in both sports. Lefty golfers are less frequently seen because left-handed golf clubs usually require special order from a limited selection.

Probably today’s most visible lefty golfer is British Open champ Bob Charles, who now plays on the senior tour. Here’s a switch: Charles is right-handed. Both his parents were left-handed and both were golfers. So when he started swinging a club at age 4, that was the way he learned, naturally.

Charles estimates that 20% of left-handed golfers of his generation switched to right because of the scarcity of clubs. They include, among others, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Johnny Miller.

It’s all quite mysterious, this phenomenon of laterality. As the debates and studies of cause and effect continue among the learned doctors, let us turn to the wisdom and clarity of that most distinguished of southpaws, the Ol’ Perfesser:

“Left-handers have much more enthusiasm for life,” said Casey Stengel. “They sleep on the wrong side of the bed and their heads become stagnant on that side.”

May he slumber with the angels.