NEWS

16/06/2021

Recently, when lefties had already rid themselves of the diabolical stigma that they had carried since the Middle Ages, when the idea that there was more criminality among their ranks was taken with a grain of salt (something that the Italian Césare Lombroso, one of the fathers of criminology, maintained modern, albeit precarious from the point of view of scientific methodology), in the late 1980s and early 1990s psychologists Diane Halpern and Stanley Coren claimed, and published in the prestigious Nature and New England Journal of Medicine, that left-handers lived an average of nine years less than right-handers. However, time showed that this conclusion - supported by recognized professionals and refereed media - had very poor foundations. It had been made from consultations with relatives of 2,000 deceased in California, asking them what was the skillful hand of the deceased. On average, lefties were nine years younger. The explanation was very simple: until recently, the older a person was, the more likely it was that they had been forced to be right-handed as a child. Left-handers, like so many minorities, have only been able to free themselves in recent decades. Since 1976, every August 13 they celebrate the International Day of Lefty; at least, no right-handed organization is known to have claimed its own day.