Growing up, I was warned about stuff. No slamming doors. Don’t run with scissors. Be nice to your sister; she is all you’ll have once we’re dead. Beware of lefties. When in doubt, take a bath.

Let’s back up to the penultimate warning: beware of lefties. Maybe it’s unsubstantiated, but lefties tend to be smarter, and well, at the very least, interesting… intersting can be a euphamism for, ah, whacko, sure, but who doesn’t love having a whacko in their life? I have amazing lefty friends, and I’ve never known them to be more quirky than my righty friends. I know they are right-brain dominant, therefore, supposedly more creative. Being a creative righty, I’m not sure I buy it. I am, however, fascinated by some of these left-handed “facts.”

Baseball parks were built so the setting sun shone into the right fielder’s eyes. Thus lefty pitchers threw toward the west with their “south paws.”

In the human population, left-handers comprise about 10%. In the animal world, the ratio of righties to lefties is about 50/50.

Communication between both sides of the brain tends to be higher among lefties. This results in a thicker corpus callosum, the link between the right and left hemispheres.

Handedness, like speech, is not apparent at birth but appears gradually as the child grows.

Using a standard “qwerty” keyboard, and typing with both hands in the conventional manner, the number of words in English that are typed solely with the left hand is in the neighborhood of 3400. Around 450 words are typed solely with the right hand.

My father, though, insists lefties are all just a touch weird. Weird isn’t always a bad thing, it’s right up there with crazy. Lefties take pride in the fact that they are a minority. They smile when they tell you, “oh, yeah, I’m a lefty, so can you tilt your head the other way?” Since when is there a “right” and “left” way of kissing? I mean, I know there’s a right way to kiss, it involves not trying to suffocate the person with your tongue, or slobber on their entire face, making her worry you didn’t eat enough dinner and want to eat her face in one big gulp without even a napkin. But a lefty kiss? Who makes this stuff up? Maybe dad was right. Still, I like quirky, long live the lefty.