SPEAKING of Geoffrey Pullum, he recently wrote on the word "right", and solved a little puzzle about how that word can be used. How did it go from meaning "exact, correct" to being a word that could modify some prepositional phrases, but not others? Why are He walked right around the lake and I dropped the hammer right on my foot acceptable, while He wandered right around drunk and I kept it secret right out of concern for your feelings are not? His answer to the puzzle is satisfying.

A different mystery about the word right has nagged at me for a while. How did it come to mean "the opposite of left" and also "something to which one is legally, morally or naturally entitled"? This wouldn't be so weird—words have multiple meanings all the time—except that Spanish derecho, French droit, Portuguese direito, German Recht and other words all carry the same double-meaning. In German, you can also say Du hast Recht, "you're right", so Recht-recht-recht has the same triple meaning in German as right (entitlement), right (not left) and right (correct) in English. In Slavic languages, the correct/not-left/entitlement words also share the same root (prav), which yields Russian pravda ("truth") to boot. The connections between the different senses of right are old, and deep.

What links all the words? The answer is a sense of naturalness, appropriateness, correctness. In a world where goodness (right) prevails, people will get what they are morally due (their rights), and will be correct (right) in their thinking and doing. Prof Pullum's conclusions about right modifying a prepositional phrase fit perfectly in here: right can modify a prepositional phrase when the thing is canonically or completely filling the condition indicated in the prepositional phrase. A book sitting right on the table is not hanging halfway off. A bullet going right through the wall did not go partway through and then get stuck. Someone walking right around the lake made a one-way completed trip, not a lazy back-and-forth.

Where does the not-left meaning come in? Simply, as the OED explains, because the right hand is the stronger and more appropriate one for most people to use for most tasks. Tellingly, the word left in several languages is cognate to English sinister, like sinistra in Italian. In many cultures, including non-European ones, the left hand is considered debased, suspicious, perhaps appropriate only for dirty tasks. (Items should not be handed over or received with the left hand in many Asian cultures, for example.) Left itself in English comes from a root meaning "weak" and so, in some contexts, "worthless".

With all this history, it's no surprise that left-handers have long found the world less than congenial. The Wikipedia article on "Bias against left-handed people" is thousands of words long. (One suspects that the a's and e's were typed more quickly and furiously than the i's and o's.) But that bias is out of date. Researchers have found left-handedness linked to a variety of traits, some good, some less so, but one quite relevant to this blog: language-learning talent.