Before the 60s, in most Catholic societies, writing with your left hand was seen as a sign of the devil and unchristian. It was thus punished very often. I heard stories in Québec (Canada) where people would be beaten their left hand until there was blood with a wooden ruler. It’s frankly horrible and someone I know did show her scars from being beaten so often.
I wasn’t even aware it came from latin, but that makes perfect sense. But it’s weird how it was considered bad up until this late in history, but it wasn’t until 1938 that someone patented the smudge-free ballpoint pen. I imagine that smudging with your left hand as you wrote must’ve been very irritating and wasteful for hundreds of years, and thus it became a sadistic ritual to “right wrongs”.
Here in Denmark we called that type of schooling “sorte skole” (black school, an expression from the mid 1500s, where schools were run by religious institutions, so perhaps it’s a reference to their clothing?), and it didn’t matter if you understood the subject or not, you just had to memorize it and do things correctly, even writing with ones right hand.
I agree that it took so long to make it seem « not bad ». I wonder how it was perceived by societies where they write from the right to the left like Hebrew or Arabic. This would be crazy, but I even wonder if right handed people could have been the ones that were attacked by the religion or it was only a catholic phenomenon.
Before the 60s, in most Catholic societies, writing with your left hand was seen as a sign of the devil and unchristian. It was thus punished very often. I heard stories in Québec (Canada) where people would be beaten their left hand until there was blood with a wooden ruler. It’s frankly horrible and someone I know did show her scars from being beaten so often.
There’s a reason that the word “sinister” has negative connotations these days, despite it originating from the latin word for “left”.
I wasn’t even aware it came from latin, but that makes perfect sense. But it’s weird how it was considered bad up until this late in history, but it wasn’t until 1938 that someone patented the smudge-free ballpoint pen. I imagine that smudging with your left hand as you wrote must’ve been very irritating and wasteful for hundreds of years, and thus it became a sadistic ritual to “right wrongs”.
Here in Denmark we called that type of schooling “sorte skole” (black school, an expression from the mid 1500s, where schools were run by religious institutions, so perhaps it’s a reference to their clothing?), and it didn’t matter if you understood the subject or not, you just had to memorize it and do things correctly, even writing with ones right hand.
Dictionary lookup on google translate
I agree that it took so long to make it seem « not bad ». I wonder how it was perceived by societies where they write from the right to the left like Hebrew or Arabic. This would be crazy, but I even wonder if right handed people could have been the ones that were attacked by the religion or it was only a catholic phenomenon.