IndieWeb Carnival June 2026: Big, left and right

A

blog post

Published

[2026-06-30 Tue]

This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is "No way!?", hosted by Alex Hsu.

What has made you go 'No way?!' in your life?

I remember having these moments most frequently in my life from some fact or analogy that gives me the briefest sliver of comprehension towards the sheer scale of the universe.

Just simple things liked the number of stars in a galaxy, and the number of galaxies in the universe. The number of planets. Or, at a different scale - physically, if not numerically - the number of neurons in the human brain, and the number of connections between them. It is all truly mind-boggling.

So mind-boggling, that I'm glad it is only a brief glimpse from time to time. A full go in the Total Perspective Vortex might be too much to take.

I remember Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything having many of these moments. But not too much, mind. I hope Bill wouldn't mind me saying that the book is only awe some, as opposed to the awe full ness of the Vortex.

More prosaically, and put in mind of it by the awesome/awful puns above, sometimes the roots of a word makes me go 'No way!?'. When you realise you've been living with a word for a long time and had just taken it for granted, and ignored all of its history.

An example - the words left and right. For a long time I was content in the knowlege that this one's that way, and that one's this way. Straightforward, right? Nothing sinister there.

Then, one day - possibly during high school French - I learned a little about some of the details of their etymology.

In French, left is 'gauche', and right is 'a droit'. And, in French (and in English, too), gauche is awkward and clumsy, adroit is skillful.

And in Latin, left is 'sinister' and right is 'dexter'. To be left is sinister, to be right is dextrous.

No way!? As a left-hander myself, I felt some righteous indignation! This was not right! Why were we being… left out… left behind?

It turns out that this antipathy to the 'left' is common in history, across cultures and religions. And most probably due to simple physiology: 9 in 10 people are right-handed, 1 in 10 left-handed. Most people are skillful with their right hand, awkward with their left. What's quite fascinating amd depressing is how a simple minority/majority imbalance led to systematic cultural prejudice over time. It's a lesson in majority rule.

Also fascinating, on the topic of left and right, is how they took on their modern political associations. I think I first heard in an episode of #ACFM that 'the left' and 'the right' in their political senses stemmed from the French Revolution and where people sat in the parliament there with different views. Those with 'progressive' views sat on the left, those who were 'conversative' views sat on the right. And those a bit more in the middle, sat, well, in the centre. (I wonder if the far left and the far right sat right at the edges?)

As usual, on the pointlessness of the left/right binary, I can find some wise words in Ursula K. Le Guin and her channeling of Taoism:

Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

– The Left Hand of Darkness

Nothing's right; there's nothing left. There's just spectrums and cycles.