Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
1–10 of 50 posts
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#2The article just kicks the can down the road: why is the left hand called the 'south paw' in boxing?
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#3The article just kicks the can down the road: why is the left hand called the 'south paw' in boxing?
[deleted]
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#4 The earliest baseball mention of a “southpaw” - as
found by Tom Shieber, senior curator at the National
Baseball Hall of Fame—appeared in the New York Atlas
in 1858, but in reference to a left-handed first
baseman, not a pitcher.
The atlas doesn't explicitly state: "We decided to call him a southpaw, because we're inventing this new term, and not because of convention, and it means 1, 2 and 3, because x, y and z."
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#5The article just kicks the can down the road: why is the left hand called the 'south paw' in boxing?
If I had to guess -- in a normal defensive stance, where both hands are held out in front, the right hand is typically higher and slightly in front of the left hand. Top being north, bottom is south.
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#6The earliest baseball mention of a “southpaw” - as found by Tom Shieber, senior curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame—appeared in the New York Atlas in 1858, but in reference to a left-handed first baseman, not a pitcher. The first documented use of a phrase or term in print, does not mean that the writer used it according to the original intended context, especially since it does not specifically get used in…
Etymological research is rarely cut-and-dry. The authors are aware of this, and the quotation is being held as a counterexample to "the conventional wisdom that the word “southpaw” originated “from the practice in baseball of arranging the diamond with the batter facing east to avoid the afternoon sun. A left-handed pitcher facing west would therefore have his pitching arm toward the south of the diamond.”"
The article goes on to point out that southpaw was almost definitely a boxing term before it was given its baseball "etymology".
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#7The article just kicks the can down the road: why is the left hand called the 'south paw' in boxing?
There's really no good "reason" here, and people keep making up superfluous descriptions, like the whole deal about ordinal baseball diamond orientations. Or, in boxing, how the southpaw stance has the left hand below ("south") the right.
The real answer appears to be that "south" merely means "opposite" and "paw" means—of course—"hand".[1]
[1] http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/southpaw
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#8The article on wordorigins.org contains more information, including this quote:
Use of southpaw to mean the left hand goes back all the way to 1813, long before baseball, as we know it today, existed. It’s used in a letter appearing in the Philadelphia newspaper The Tickler on 30 June of that year:
“Luk here mon, and convince yourself,” said he, holding up the Tickler, in the right paw, between the ceiling and the floor, and with the south paw pointing to the “bow, vow, vow.”
(Source - http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/southpaw/)
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#9The article just kicks the can down the road: why is the left hand called the 'south paw' in boxing?
If I had to guess -- in a normal defensive stance, where both hands are held out in front, the right hand is typically higher and slightly in front of the left hand. Top being north, bottom is south.
For a lefty, you're correct. But for a righty, then the right hand would be south. So, that can't possibly be the reason why boxers call lefties 'Southpaws'
Re: Why are left-handers called “southpaws”? (2015)
#10[deleted]