LEFT, adj., adv., n. This week a student in French 101 asked me about the origin of “tout droit” (straight, as in “go straight, don’t turn”). “Droit” is French for “right,” and it’s in both the sense of your right hand and your right to vote. It comes from Latin “directus,” which means “direct, straight, level, upright,” as you probably already guessed. The Latin word for the opposite of left is “dexter,” and I’m not really sure why Romance languages mostly get their contemporary words for “right” from “directus” instead of “dexter,” but it shows us that the semantic connection between straightness and rightness—of laws, roads, and hands—is old. I wrote a previous newsletter about how often languages use a word for “twisted, crooked” to mean “wrong.”
So since I already talked about rightness and wrongness, I thought maybe I should look into rightness and leftness.
“Left,” as in the hand opposite your right hand, merits a whopping six paragraphs of etymological explanation in the OED, which is a lot of words to say that nobody is exactly sure where it comes from.
Not Old English, though. The Old English word for “left” is the obsolete “winster,” which the OED says is “[a]pparently originally a euphemistic designation for the side that is perceived to be weaker and therefore inferior and less favoured” (apologies to my left-handed readers: today’s newsletter continues on this theme). You might note that “winster” looks a little bit like Latin “sinister,” also meaning left, and that’s because they’ve got the same stack of comparative suffixes on the end (-is, -ter), both of which go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. The “win” part of “winster” come from Old English “wine,” meaning “friend,” so “winster” literally means “friendlier.” The “sin” part of sinister “is probably [from] the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit san- to gain, to obtain (compare the early Sanskrit superlative formation saniṣṭha most winning, compare also vaniṣṭha , in the same sense,” according to the OED.
All of this is very cool, but it doesn’t help us with “left.”
The word “left” has cognates in many Germanic languages, but there isn’t much attestation in Middle English to explain why we now say this particular phonological form (left instead of lift, luf, etc.) and we’ll never know why English speakers abandoned Old English “winster” for “left.”
As I said before, nobody is quite sure what the Germanic root of “left” is, but there’s some speculation that its original meaning was “weak, useless,” since for right-handed people, the left hand is the weak hand. That feels unkind, but it’s one degree less gross than contemporary English usage of “sinister,” I guess.
Interestingly, French also abandoned a previous word for left—senestre—and replaced it with “gauche,” another word of uncertain origin. What we’re seeing with these replacements is something linguists call “the euphemism cycle” where people use a harmless word for something they find offensive, taboo, or scary, and then slowly that harmless word takes on all the negative connotations of the word it replaced, so we need a new harmless word to replace the one we loaded down with all our old prejudices. We can turn even the nicest, most harmless and well-intentioned term into something nasty. If you’ve ever wondered why the language surrounding identity seems to change all the time, the reason isn’t that the old words are bad—it’s that people won’t stop being shitty bigots. (This is an explanation of how language changes, not an argument for using dated words! Call people what they want to be called.)
And since this newsletter never misses an opportunity to talk about the French Revolution, I will mention that French is also responsible for the political sense of “left”—you know, believing in human rights—because at meetings of the French National Assembly in 1789, the monarchists sat on the right side of the room and the common people sat on the left. It took a few decades for the term to filter into British English.
Meanwhile, even two centuries later, we US English speakers still hardly know what the political left is, but sweet fuck I would love to find out some day.
In Capital-R Romance, I revisited Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin for writing research purposes, but only the tiniest fragment, so we don’t gotta talk about that. Here are some of the small-r romances I read (not all of them, but I’m short on time so I’ll come back for the others next week):
Division Bells (gay m/bi m, both cis, contemporary, novella) by Iona Datt Sharma. I learned so much about British parliamentary procedure from this. And I’m always so impressed when a novella fits in such rich characterization. This one has a very grouchy protagonist who initially hates his new “spad” (special adviser) and—spoiler—eventually comes to love him. Content warnings: grief.
Rogue Spy (m/f, both cishet, historical) by Joanna Bourne. I’ve lavished so much praise on Joanna Bourne’s writing in previous newsletters that it’s almost embarrassing. Anyway I’m obsessed with how every tiny gesture and glance in this book is imbued with significance—sometimes multiple layers thereof—and every spy character is like, seemingly English but secretly French and then even more secretly Danish or Italian. This also has a good Rousseau joke in it: from “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers” (Man is born free and is everywhere in chains) to “Le cheval est né libre et partout il est dans les rênes” (Horse is born free and is everywhere in reins). What more could you want? Content warnings: murder, violence, torture, child abuse, mentions of rape, sex.
You Had Me at Hola (m/f, both cishet, contemporary) by Alexis Daria. This story of two Latinx actors who fall in love while they play lovers on a TV show has so many delicious layers of feelings both real and pretend. I loved both main characters, the glimpses behind the scenes, and the whole cast—and I especially love the care Alexis Daria takes to write a broadly inclusive, diverse world. This novel has queer and trans supporting characters! It’s fun and brilliant and will absolutely provide you a few hours of blissful escape if you live in constant-news hell. Content warnings: a main character has previously had a stalker.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance:
I read several different articles on why we don’t feel like practicing self-care (exercise, going outside, hygiene, drinking water, whatever) right now, which was sort of reassuring for grim misery-loves-company reasons. Anyway, my favorite was Jess Zimmerman’s Let’s Just Lie on the Floor and Scream Together, on throwing stress tantrums.
I know Halloween’s over but let’s get sinister this week.
See you next Sunday!
