Adroit properly means "to the right" (French, à droite).

Dear wwh,

Thinking over what you've written it occurred to me that we also use "dextrous" in the sense of adroit, from the Latin "dexter" = right, but I can't think of a derivative of "sinister" = left being used in the same way as "gauche".

dxb

Ooops - reading on in my catching up, I see that MG more or less raised this point already - sorry MG.

dxb