10 times you shouldn’t use your left hand

Good dining table etiquette requires passing food and drink to the right. This rule is an attempt to impose order on the process of passing food and drink at the dining table. “What’s important is that when several dishes are being passed at the same time, they all go in the same direction,” Emily Post explains. In other words, the rule could just as easily have been ‘pass to the left’. But someone chose ‘right’, and so it is.

“If you’ve got an iPhone, you’re likely to get better reception if you hold it in your right hand (and right ear) during a call,” according to a report commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers regarding how effectively different smartphones caught and sent radio signals. “This could be because the left-left combination adds a greater obstruction between the phone’s antenna and the wireless signal than a right-right combination would,” suggests Quartz, a business thought-leadership publication, in its post about the report.

While we’re on the subject of smart phones, here’s the best way to charge your device to make its battery last longer.

When signing, it doesn’t matter which hand you use, as long as you pick a hand and stick with it. “You should not switch back and forth between dominant hands,” advises Signing Savvy. “Most signers will be able to understand your signs no matter which hand you use as the dominant hand.” So, if you’ve been signing with your right as dominant, don’t switch, mid-conversation, to signing with the left.

In India, the left hand is associated with personal hygiene – and that includes putting on and taking off your shoes. It’s also considered generally impure. That’s why you should never use it to pass an item – be it the salt and pepper shaker or a business card – to another person. In fact, some people in India will refuse to accept an object that’s been passed using the left hand.

For the same reasons it’s considered rude to pass an object using your left hand in India, it’s also considered poor form in India to allow your left hand to come into contact with food, including serving yourself from a platter or eating off your own plate with it.

Being left-handed comes with some perks. We bet you didn’t know these 15 things about left-handed people.

The Ethiopian style of eating forgoes utensils and individual plates in favour of breaking off pieces of injera’ – a flatbread – to scoop food up from communal bowls straight into your mouth. But only the right hand is to be used for this. As in India, people in Ethiopia are trained to use their left hand for ‘bathroom’ purposes, so the left hand is considered ‘dirty’.

Ethiopians don’t see currency as dirty, however; when exchanging currency from person to person, the right hand is used.

In the Middle East, unlike in Ethiopia, it’s considered rude to touch money with your left hand. It’s also rude to pick anything up with your left hand. And as in Ethiopia and India, it’s considered rude to eat with the left hand in the Middle East.

If you’re skipping these 14 social niceties, your manners may need a makeover.

The right side is always the ‘right’ side in Ghana, where it’s considered taboo to use your left hand for pretty much anything. If you forget yourself and do anything with your left hand, you’ll be expected to say, “Sorry for left,” shares The Culture Chameleon.

Well, it’s not so much that you should never write in Japanese with your left hand, but more about the fact that when you do, you’re going to working against yourself. The strokes that make up Japanese lettering are all written left to right, and it’s more difficult to push a stroke from left to right than to pull it, according to Sue Umezaki, an American living in Japan.

In all of the aforementioned countries, where the left hand is considered dirty, shaking hands using the left hand would be out of the question. But it’s also out of the question virtually everywhere else in the world. In fact, colloquially across the US, the term ‘left-handed handshake’ is considered an insult and refers to insincere promises.

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Source: RD.com