Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress or
manufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of right
and left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitely
increase for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases like
boots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person's
intelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habitually
tied in a sailor's knot acquires one long side, left, and one short one,
right, from the way it is manipulated by the right hand; if it were tied
by the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrews
and of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with the
natural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrew
with the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterly
awkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers the
keyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to the
right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it be
conveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches and
the numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is a
peculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. A
servant offers you dishes from the left side: you can't so readily help
yourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired of
the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to
keep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn at
the left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the
side; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right
hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the left
breast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to
reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once that
they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original
right-handedness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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