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The word sinister, suggestive of darkness or evil, comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side.” The association of “left” with “evil” is likely because of the dominance of right-handed people within a population.
Sinister comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side,” and while the earliest uses of the word in English—dating from the 14th century—pertain to some measure of evil, foreboding, or malevolence, others retain the Latin meaning of “left”.
The association of the directional left with evil is likely attributed to the dominance of right-handed people within a population, and consequently the awkwardness of motions made from the left side of the body.
Such darkness wasn’t always attached to that side, however. The Ancient Celts, for example, worshipped the left side, associating it with femininity and the fertile womb. But beginning with the appearance of Eve on Adam’s left side in accounts of Genesis, the Christian tradition finds instances of the left side being pinned to immorality. The Book of Matthew describes how God will divide nations on the Day of Judgment, “as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left,” with those on the right sent to the kingdom of Heaven and those on the left “cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” Left-handed people comprise only 10 percent of the population, and the preference for the left hand demonstrated by the popular minority was attributed to demonic possession, leading to accusations of witchcraft.
In the 20th century, anthropologists and psychologists identified left-handedness as a biological anomaly, one associated with deviancy but that could be corrected away with behavioral reinforcement.
If ‘Left’ Is Evil, What About ‘Right’?
The historical association of sinister with evil or backwardness is balanced linguistically by the fact that dexter, the Latin word meaning “on the right side,” comes with a largely positive connotation that survives throughout its linguistic descendants.
To be dexterous, for example, is to be good with the hands (like a surgeon) or a clever thinker, while one who is ambidextrous uses one’s left and right hand equally well.
The French word for “right or straight,” droit, gives us our word adroit, with a meaning similar to dexterous. The parallel is carried on by other words. The French word for “left,” gauche, is used in English to mean “lacking social grace” (“it’s considered gauche to arrive without a gift for the host”); a synonym of gauche, also from French, is maladroit (“a maladroit attempt to express his condolences”), which again utilizes the French word droit.
And of course, our word right is used to mean “correct,” “true,” or “ethically sound” (“a right answer”; “didn’t have the right address”; “the right thing to do”).
A popular maxim found on refrigerator magnets says that if the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handed people are in their right minds. In spite of that observation, the linguistic bias against the left side, and left-handedness in particular, is entrenched in English and many other languages, and likely will never go away.
Of course, if you know a left-handed person, then you know they’re no more “wrong” or “injurious” or perverse than the righties out there.
About 10 percent of people around the world are left-handed, including some of the most famous people in history: Leonardo Da Vinci, for one, as well as Lewis Carroll, Albert Einstein, and Marie Curie. Not to mention all of the famous lefties of the modern era like Jimi Hendrix, Sir Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, and Celine Dion. And let’s not leave out Ned Flanders, a beloved instance from fiction.
The list goes on, but the gist is that left-handed people make up a whole lot of the famous names we know for only being about 10 percent of the population, and left-handedness is something to celebrate. Hence left-handers day on August 13. This year, however, the day falls on Friday the 13th, which has its own sinister connotations.
Ambidextrous and … Ambisinister
All this talk about left versus right may make the options feel binary. For some, there’s more to the equation (though the left and right biases are carried over in this language too).
The first to know is ambidextrous, which is an adjective that describes someone who’s able to use both hands equally well. Note the tie to the same dexter that’s connected to right handedness (ambi- is a prefix that means “both”). Here, ambidextrous has a positive connotation of unusually skillful. It’s also unusual to bump into someone who is truly ambidextrous: only about 1 percent of people can use both hands equally (more, however, are relatively skillful with both hands, which is called mixed handedness).
On the other side there’s ambisinister, which describes someone who is clumsy or unskillful with both hands. Sinister, of course, comes from the same left origin.
Sinister may have a linguistic and historic connection to left-handed people, but at the end of the day, lefties are as skillful, lucky, and dexterous (“skillful or adroit”) as right-hand dominant people.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/meme-word-origins-history
https://www.dictionary.com/articles/sinister-dexter-left-right-word-origin-history