we are doing a brain mapping (fMRI) study on anagrams and creativity and need anagram experts to participate. the study is located in west los angeles, and starts immediately. you must be right handed and a native english speaker to participate. you will be compensated $25/hr for your time. if you live in los angeles and are interested, please let me know if you are interested ASAP.

Come do one in upstate New York and I'm your man.

just out of curiosity, what's wrong with cack-handed anagrams?
-ron (I am not a lefty) obvious

I would suspect that the differences in brain hemisphere language functioning between north- and south-paws would cause the two groups to be considered separately. I would just hope that they are considering the significant differences between the two main groups of lefties.

the significant differences between the two main groups of lefties

which are?

You got your write mirror image to righties only in the other direction lefties and your hook your arm around and write from above lefties and apparently the right/left brain handling of language is different in the two groups. The lovely AnnaS should be able to expound better on the brain differences between the two groups.

huh. I allus thought that was just the teachin'...

looking forward to hearing more.

hook your arm around and write from above lefties

I think I belong to a subgroup of that faction: the hold your hand up in the air like a spider and try not to touch the paper lefties.

The "spider" description comes from The Left-Hander's Book of Days, and is a quote from some left-handed celebrity whose name escapes me...sorry

Lefties who write just like righties, holding the pen mirror-image, have two speech centers and are less likely to suffer aphasia after a stroke. That's all I can remember from the study I read, but I assume they have other important bits on both sides of the brain.

Us lefties who contort to write are indeed the exact opposite of righties, with the brain halves reversed. It sounds counterintuitive: you'd think the brains of mirror-image lefties would be the exact opposite of righties' brains, but.

Hmm. My daughter is one of those mirror image lefties. Both of her grandfathers were left-handed. Her paternal grandfather died decades ago (I never met him) and my father hasn't been left-handed since he started writing and had it beaten out of him by superstitious idiots. His handwriting is weird, slants all over the place. I wonder whether he was one of those mirror image guys. My late-ex-father-in-law had a set of left-handed golf clubs, which makes me think he was a mirror image specimen. My daughter surely is; all her life when she has imitated me doing anything (turning a switch, using a potter's wheel) she has exactly reversed everything. Which meant we had to use a wheel whose direction could be switched.

And I wonder whether people stay of the mirror image persuasion even when they have been trained out of left-handedness. I mean in their brain chemistry or whatever.

I remember watching AnnaS write in that Anglo-Saxon class we took 28 years ago thinking I'd have to tie my ass in a knot to do that.

You got your write mirror image to righties only in the other direction lefties and your hook your arm around and write from above lefties and apparently the right/left brain handling of language is different in the two groups.

I have heard that - although some left-handed guitarists just learned to play/approach the instrument by *flipping a 'right-hand strung' instrument over (making the lower notes nearer to the floor) some prefer the guitar to be 'left-hand strung', as a mirror image.

Parbably the same *issues.

some left-handed guitarists just learned to play/approach the instrument by *flipping a 'right-hand strung' instrument over (making the lower notes nearer to the floor) some prefer the guitar to be 'left-hand strung', as a mirror image.

Be interesting to see if it correlates with writing style.

Oh, I always thought some lefties wrote that way so that they wouldn't smudge up their pages when writing.

so that they wouldn't smudge up their pages

That would seem the obvious reason, but does it explain why the others don't write that way? And, if there is a correlation between style of writing and the way that language is handled in the different halves of the brain, would it be explained by (or would it explain) different attitudes towards paper smudging?

That would seem the obvious reason...

Not so obvious, specifically if the end of the pen is out in front of the hand (as I personally do) where it wouldn't matter which side you write from... even in a left-to-right written language 'such as' English.

I can't visualize why that would be better Musick. Does the meat of the palm not smudge along the written words anyway when writen by a lefty?

bel,

I smudge all over the place, which is why I learned early on to rotate the paper 90º counterclockwise and write from bottom to top. This keeps my hand in a more natural position: otherwise I'd have to use Golden Boy's spider technique or just arch my hand way up.

It always elicits comments at check-out counters and other public places where I have to sign something, but it works for me.

Does the meat of the palm not smudge along the written words anyway when writen by a lefty?

Not when the lower 1/4 of the pen is in front of the whole hand as is my practice as a righty.

Do you expect the pen, as it is held in the hand, to be facing either left-to-right sideways away from the written text (or versa-vis with a lefty) or slightly toward the *penperson... as it seems with your description of a lefty? My *penmanship always holds the lower part of the pen furthest away from the body, as to not have an effect even if I was scripting in Hebrew.

I may have learned this *clean practice from writing music scores using a #1 pencil.

Which makes me wonder about languages written the other way, such as Arabic. Are right-handed people at a disadvantage because they are in danger of smudging the ink?

I;ve never seen anyone write in Arabic, but the printed stuff I've seen makes me think that you need a calligraphic pen or a brush such as the Japanese and Chinese use to write the broad and tapered strokes. Or is it possible to write that stuff with just a pencil or "single-thickness" pen?

Or is it possible to write that stuff with just a pencil or "single-thickness" pen?

I haven't seen anybody write Arabic, but have seen friends writing in Farsi and Urdu which use the Arabic script. It seem to me that held their hand elevated and did not drag it along the paper. (Not sure if they could do so for a longish period.) They used standard pens and pencils.

I often get my lunch from a place run by Koreans and once a week or so I go to the Chinese takeout up the street from the Koreans. In both places they write your order in Korean or Chinese with a pencil or ballpoint pen, although both Chinese and Korean have, properly, thick and thin strokes. But then, with the limited vocabulary they need to write a lunch order, maybe it doesn't matter.

There are actually two sorts of writing combined by Koreans. They have a phonetic alphabet called Hangul which is written without regard to the thickness of pen strokes and they use a number of Chinese characters, intermixed with the Hangul words, where stroke thickness matters. My guess is that the average Korean noting an order in a restaurant writes entirely in Hangul.

where stroke thickness matters

Sorry, but I've looked at quite a bit of both written and printed Japanese and Chinese, and stroke thickness has nothing to do with comprehensibility, but rather number and position of strokes. The thickness of strokes is more like the serifs on Times Roman. Mere ornamentation. In fact, if you look at the older Chinese characters, which were carved on stone and bronze, they are completely lacking in the thickness and little serif like doodads.

Gosh. All of those hours spent sitting in an uncomfortable position, holding the brush just the way Kim Son-Sang-Nim taught me, thinking that I was doing something important by paying attention to what my master told me about the thickness of my strokes ... and I was wrong.

Probably the thickness of the strokes is important only to the esthetics of the writing and has nothing to do with the meaning.

Probably the thickness of the strokes is important only to the esthetics of the writing and has nothing to do with the meaning.

That's pretty much how I see it. Aesthetics can be important, but usually not for semantics. Language is a messy thang. One thing that Chinese do sometimes when discussing characters is to "draw" them in the palm of their hand with their index finger. (Heck, I've done it myself with success.) It's the order, number, and position of the strokes that's important in that case.

Another "myth" about Chinese is that it cannot really be represented by some kind of phonemic writing system, like pinyin. This is just so much poppycock. When speaking Chinese there is usually no recourse to characters; in fact, there are—gasp—illiterate Chinese who speak the language daily.