Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Words aren’t static, of course. They evolve over time, the meanings gradually shifting with the generations, or sometimes, a word gets appropriated by a cause, event, or company, and its primary meaning can shift virtually overnight.

One of my favorite examples of the gradual shift is the word sinister. Sinister is, even without its history, a perfectly wonderful word. That snaky repeated s just makes it sound evil, and the word even contains ‘sin’. How much better can you get for describing a threatening or harmful situation?

That’s not at all how the word started though. If you want to get an idea, look at the archaic use of sinister in heraldry. For those of you that don’t know, heraldry is the art of designing and describing the parts of the coats of arms of families, knights or countries. It’s more than a bit out of fashion, but still quite fascinating. In heraldry, sinister simply means on the left of the coat of arms as you’re looking at it.

Nothing too scary about that, is there?

Apparently the origins of this particular word stem from the prejudices of the ancient Romans. You see, in Latin, sinister is left, and dexter is right. The majority of people were, as they are now, right handed. Dexter, then, gave birth to the word dexterous, which means skillful, capable or adept. My apologies to any lefties in the readership, but the ancient Romans didn’t think too highly of you. Partly, no doubt, this is due to the fact that they valued being ‘Roman’, by which they meant pretty much the same, very highly. One place you can see their bias in action is in one of the Roman versions of fortune telling. Birds, especially ravens and eagles, were known to be messengers of the gods. Observing them, and their behavior, would then reveal to mere mortals what the gods wanted them to know. This is known as ornithomancy, and was also popular in Greece. If you watched a bird and it flew to your right, this was a good omen, flying to the left? Not so much.

It isn’t just the Romans that had it in for lefties, though. In French, the words for left and right are gauche and droit, respectively. Gauche has come to mean something crude, awkward, or socially unacceptable. Droit, on the other hand, typically used as ‘a droit’, meaning on the right, entered English as adroit, meaning clever or skillful.

Left handedness has been associated with demonic possession, witchcraft, and mental weakness over the years. This is primarily from the ‘different is bad’ vein of thinking, of course, but it has left the the word “left” or “sinister”, cast as a villain. Even in our less controversial “left” and “right”, right also means correct, and left means, well, the remainder, or what wasn’t wanted.

I have to admit, I still love the word sinister, it rolls off the tongue so smoothly, and feels like the wickedness it’s meant to conjure up, though I’m rather grateful they’ve quit burning lefties at the stake, or even forcing them to write with their non-dominant hand, something they were doing as late as the 80’s in public schools.

And that, dear children, constituted both your history and your English lesson for the day. Don’t you feel educated?

Cheers,

Michelle