Ned is a religious character. Coming out as left handed was a big deal.
Francine in American Dad did the same.
Yeah remember this is from the 90s, and Ned was in his 40s then, making him born in the 50s.
When he was a child he would have still been chastised or hit with a ruler for using his left hand.
Good lord! I haven’t seen an image of Ned Flanders in so long I never saw how much Ted Lasso is based on Ned Flanders. Think about it.
I played guitar and goalie in hockey right handed because that’s what you can find used.
It’s always weird that I find the idea of fretting with my right hand to be horrifying, even though it’s probably generally more dexterous than my left hand.
Guitar is a relatively ambidextrous instrument, yet the thought of flipping one over and swapping what each hand does is nightmarish
Fretting isn’t the part that requires dexterity. It’s the picking. Picking requires much more fine motor control than fretting.
That’s why right handed people fret with their left hand. It’s the weak hand and fretting requires less dexterity, leaving the dominant hand free to do the hard part.
If you picked up a left handed guitar, you could almost definitely figure out the fretting within a few minutes. But you’d have to seriously relearn how to pick with your left hand, if you were even able to.
Pretty sure Ned is the Devil
And sexy
Ned is a sweet guy. He’s probably ambi-dextrose. /s
No wonder his wife jumped to her death.
All these images were taken via a mirror
Look, let’s just agree that while Ned isn’t left handed, he has a right to be left handed.
I recall some of my teachers (boomer generation, I’m an old millennial) said they would get a sharp crack across the knuckles with a ruler should they dare to use their left hands with which to write. Seemed more common amongst the ones from Quebec.
Literally where the word “sinister” comes from. It used to mean left-handed.
I had a Great Uncle that was a lefty and he was forced to write with his right hand. He had the most beautiful cursive penmanship you ever saw. So flowing and elegant. It was perfect. I can’t imagine his struggle to be that good.
Both my parents were lefties also, (what are those odds?). And I was the only one of the us 4 kids to be so afflicted. And in the early 1960s when I learned to write, I drove my teachers to the brink of madness being a lefty. I was constantly admonished to keep my paper properly vertical and not turned 90 degrees. And my letters never had the correct slant to them, in cursive the letters need to slant forward just a bit. Mine tended to slant backwards. I also often got lower marks on my papers because of my left handed penmanship. And to be fair, my penmanship is still poor to this day. Writing in the western world is not made for us members of the Bar Sinister.
As far as Ned owning the Leftorum and being right handed, that is the joke within the joke.
It’s a Catholic school thing but they’ve been somewhat pushed out of education in the 60s’s quiet revolution.
This was common in France too.
Chinese people too
Among US Catholics as well
My wife’s mom was left handed, but forced to write using her right hand (in the Netherlands in the 1950s).
It actually helped her when she got some degenerative nerve disease since her right hand was the last thing to lose control, so she could write even when she couldn’t speak. 😟
My grandmother had said when she was learning to write, they would tie her left hand behind her back to force her to use her right.
This is pretty much it. Like I learned everything using my right hand. Turns out I can play guitar and write with my left hand, and type faster than most of the older people I’ve met with my left hand alone.
This is the problem with lefties - endless purity tests…
You need to be on top of your game at all times when you are a member of the Bar Sinister.
No true Lefthandsman
This is literally what a lot of the boomers were forced to learn to do. Lefties became ambidextrous or got called the devil in a not fun way.
Was going to post, there was a time in history left handed people were considered odd and unacceptable so they would often be abused into right handed. Especially in religious ran schools. So Ned is probably old enough to have the wonderful yardstick across the knuckles treatment.
It’s where the word sinister comes from. In Latin it just means left, left hand side. Then in Medieval times the right got positive associations and the left negative which lead to left is bad then to evil. Hence sinister means evil. And why left handedness became associated with the devil.
Oh, that’s an interesting bit of information. Thank you!
Yep. I am proud member of the Bar Sinister. And yes, Ricky Bobby I will put that evil on you because of it.
I use both hands and their pronouns are those hands them hands
Makes you think about the word right, right?
I am a millennial and I know people they tried to convince to write right handed in elementary school.
I’m pretty sure that’s literally what happened in the show isn’t it?
Ned being shown as right handed while owning a store that caters exclusively to left handed people, is the joke within the joke. It’s not that deep.
It shows Ned has a bit of shrewd business sense because he knows that lefties will more than willing to pay a premium to get left handed items. For example, I was willing to double the price to buy left handed scissors because it sucks to use “normal” right handed ones. Evidently, cutting stainless steel shim stock is hard on them and you can only resharpen them so many times. So I paid a lot of extra money to have a tool that I could comfortably use.
Funny thing about guitar:
I am left handed. I play a standard guitar, neck in left hand. I have since the late 1900s. I’ve taught several right-handed people guitar, more than half of them want a “lefty” guitar to put the fretboard in their right. At least one was willing to try to play a normal guitar upside down, not restrung Jimi Hendrix style. So I’m not convinced we don’t just have guitars backwards.
I made the transition from trumpet to french horn just fine as well.
the late 1900s
sighs
Late 1900s is better than mid 1900s…
Drink it in. Everyone in Hansen are in their 40s now.
Good to go you mean?
I’ve also been playing since the late 20th century. It took me years to realize how much more comfortable it was to play with the strap shortened and the neck pointed up a little so the pickups sit around midriff level. (This was crystallized by playing a classical guitar for the first time.) Do people find a low-slung guitar comfortable to play or are hundreds of professional guitarists doing it because it looks cool? No wonder people complain about bar chords!
They do it because it looks cool. And their playing suffers because if it.
I feel like when Blink-182 were peak popularity around the turn of the century, they brought with them incredibly low hanging guitars. I think they’re also giants and so it appeared even lower. But punk and it’s offshoots tended to do the low guitar thing.
And so for me, when I was in a band as a kid, I sacrificed comfort and some of my ability to play to look cool. The number one rule of combat (and life) is: Always Look Cool.
When playing seated, I rest the guitar on my right leg, neck slightly up. Standing, or my favorite, reclining, I prefer to have the guitar nearly vertical kind of like a cello.
I’m also left handed and play standard guitar. I can’t imagine using my right hand to hit the fret board and it seems like it would be way harder than strumming.
I was forced to use my right hand for everything once I started elementary school. So I write, play guitar, and bowl with my right hand. But I also do all those things slightly better and more comfortably with my left hand.
Makes sense to me.
My grandpa was left handed, but in his time (the 20’s) the nuns slapped him on his hand with a yardstick every time he tried doing something left handed. So the episode was believable for my family.
I can’t imagine being a kid, followed around by nuns daily as they attempt to beat the left handedness out of me.
what i can’t imagine is being the adults who think it’s worth giving a single fuck about, how fucked up do you have to be to treat kids that way?
It always makes me think of my grandpa, who was by all means raised in the kind of culture where that kind of thing might happen, but by the magic of being a basically good person he hit my dad ONCE and felt absolutely terrible about it and never did it again.like i get that people were raised to think differently in the past, but i don’t buy that you can be raised into accepting child abuse.
Did you know the Mormons don’t like red hair? They also didn’t want me to dye it… So basically they would prefer I just didn’t exist.
… No? People love shitting on the Mormons, but that doesn’t mean spreading misinformation is okay. They have nothing against red hair. Been a member of the church my entire life and I think this is one of the stupidest thing I’ve heard.
I mean it’s not as common as tracking people who don’t come to church but yeah it absolutely happens,
I’d love to see an actual source for that. I’m all for calling out the church when needed, and there is good reason to do so today, but I’ve been the bishop’s secretary before and can confidently say you’re wrong.
going directly to hell before you die, because god ran out of cyan toner.
The answer is religion. It poisoned their mind into thinking they have to,abuse their child to keep them safe from the devil’s influence.
It isn’t just nuns. My grandparents did the same thing to my mom and it never stopped her from using her left hand but it did teach her how to be ambidextrous.
They were doing that to my father in the 60s.
A friend of mine who finished high school in the early 2000s had this experience from his grandpa. Smacked hime every time he tried to use his left hand for something.
My brother eats and writes left handed and does literally everything else right handed. I’ve never met anyone else like that.
Practise thyself even in the things which thou despairest of accomplishing. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than the right hand; for it has been practised in this.
-Marcus Aurelius
You can be a left hand, right eye dominant shooter. It’s all about what you practice. Ned probably grew up getting his knuckles rapped for using the devil’s hand and just knows those skills better now.
Left handedness being seen as sinful fits the character, and the time in which the show was made. They make this reference of left handedness being looked down upon many times.
That’s sinister!
