When I was very young, I secretly wanted to be left-handed. My older brother is left-handed, and I wanted to be just like him. This desire even extended to wanting to wear his underwear. I was still in diapers at the time, a weak substitute for the magnificence of Jockey shorts, I thought.

Of the two ways I wanted to be just like my brother, I always assumed my desire to be left-handed was more socially acceptable.

Boy, was I wrong. Or, perhaps I should say that on this subject, I was far from right.

For much of human history, and all around the world, left-handers often have been left out in the cold.

And it's not just because they're stuck using right-handed scissors and desks at school. Many people have actually believed that lefties were sinister. (That's right: evil.) The very word, sinister, comes from the Latin word for left, which was considered to be--at best--unlucky.

For example, the left side of the Buddhist yin and yang symbol, yin, represents darkness, while the right represents light and life.

The left side gets distinctly bad treatment in the Bible, where, in one famous passage, sheep are at the right hand of Jesus and goats are on the left. While the sheep go to heaven, the goats are destined for eternal barbecue. (If you want to remember this image forever, listen to the Cake song "Sheep Go to Heaven." It might never leave your head; it's that catchy.)

The Maoris of New Zealand thought that if you had a tremor while you were sleeping, a ghost had seized your spirit. The Maoris did their best to find out which side of the body had been jiggled. If it was the right, good luck was coming. But a tremor on the left meant bad luck, and possibly death.

Moving counterclockwise was considered moving in "the wrong direction." The Scots called this withershins, a movement associated with witchcraft.

Even today, when we're supposedly beyond superstition, our language is full of left-handed compliments--that is, insults--for southpaws. How do you describe someone who is really trusted and valuable to you? He's your right-hand man. What if you're a bad dancer? You have two left feet. Have you ever said, "How gauche" to describe something tactless? What you're really saying, in French, is "How left-handed." My favorite word for left, the Romany word bongo, means crooked or evil.

Even in English, though, we punish the southpaw. Take a moment to look at the Encarta dictionary entry for left-handed. Does it surprise you to learn that "clumsy" is one of the definitions of the term?

There are exceptions, of course. The Boy Scouts shake with their left hands. The official explanation for this is that it comes from an Ashanti custom where the bravest men shook left-handed, because it required them to put down their shields. But some experts in handedness point out, perhaps rightly, that the Boy Scouts' founder, Lord Baden-Powell, supported the Ambidextral Culture Society in England. He might have had an ulterior motive for encouraging the left-handed greeting.

When you stop to think about all of this, it's really bizarre. Our left and right hands look more or less alike. It takes several years of practice for most of us to even distinguish between left and right. I can distinctly recall going to kindergarten with my shoes on the wrong feet. So, why the bias against the left hand?

I have no idea. But my thinking did lead me to some very interesting tidbits of information.