I keep sporadically a list of left-handed actors I see on my TV. I say actors, though it may just be an attribute of the character. As lists go, it’s probably pretty banal. I resist Googling left-handed actors, though I imagine there are many such lists. It may well be that I have discovered absolutely nothing of significance by detecting lefties on TV. Maybe I’m even being a Quisling—this list could spell trouble in the wrong hands. On the other hand, maybe this is just the sort of thing it takes to get tapped for membership by the secret lefty society. After all, guess what Ford, Reagan, H. W. Bush, Clinton, Obama and Rip Torn have in common—it’s not the Skull and Bones Society.

Keeping the list may be trivial and odd; being left-handed in modern America is both mundane and strange. It’s ostracizing in elementary school, when one is assigned blunted scissors and sequestered to a special desk—or at least it was in the 1970s when I was in grade school. Erasable ink pens were introduced sometime around my years in junior high. I’d thought they’d save me. I had terrible handwriting and hoped these pens would allow me to correct my many mistakes. But for a lefty, the ink gets erased with the edge of the hand just after each letter is printed.

One probably has to be left-handed to even notice how entirely humanity discriminates against the left side. Everything is built for the convenience of the righty. Everything. Lefties even forget this, because they learned from a very early age how to handle the right-handed world just fine. Tools for lefties seem patronizing. To me they are difficult to use, since I learned how to reverse or turn over everything when I was in my single digits. Using a left-handed tool is like reading text written backwards in the mirror. There’s too much redoubling and re-reversing. It’s just easier to do it backwards.

I don’t want to compare being left-handed to being a race, gender, or sex that is persecuted. In my culture, few people notice or care. Yet, most lefties really are “born this way.” And they really do live entirely against the grain of civilization. It’s just that they’re very good at it. They know the world is built wrong, and they deal with it.

I can tell if a man is left-handed more easily than a woman. It’s the pants pockets that gives them away. The rips and worn patches from keys, phones, and wallets are on the other side. Women have less in their pockets, if they have pockets at all, so it’s harder to tell. Lefties, it would seem, are better at mobile phone use. It’s the righties that hold their phones to their left ears with their right hands while they drive, but I don’t know why. Watches are often an indicator, but they are difficult to buckle onto a right wrist, so it’s not always a safe bet.

I work as a university lecturer. I write on the chalkboard, and I see my students write. The ratio is typically 3 lefties out of every 25 students. I teach writing to engineers these days, and it’s a similar ratio of women to men. When I mention a student’s left-handedness to them (which can really startle a student—they often seem astonished that I can see them, despite the fact that that’s all I do, look at and talk to them), they often say “Yeah, we noticed you are too.” They say “we” because they often sit near each other. This may seem preordained due the fact that the few lefty-desks in most rooms are always clustered together on the room’s edge, but lefties don’t typically bother seeking out those desks. One only hears about the “wrongway” desks when a righty complains about having to sit at one. Lefties notice each other. They meet at the left-hand corner of tables, where they have learned to sit. Obviously, like seeks out like, and there’s safety in numbers, but lefties aren’t typically found sitting in the middle of the room. They are on the edges and the righties are oblivious to them.

All this is to say that being left-handed has just got to be somehow fundamental to someone’s character—practically speaking, the left-handed do everything differently and they are always in the minority. There just has to be metaphysical and biological significance to this, yet the phenomenon remains mysterious. So, if a character on a show or movie is a lefty, it’s either an important trait or trivial. On 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy teases Liz Lemon for being left-handed. He believes her to be essentially wrong about everything, and this is just another example. Tina Fey, who played Lemon, is a lefty. Her character is maladroit, typically wrong, and usually inadvertently successful. She’s a woman in an office of mostly men. She’s an oddball that gets by on wit and luck. She is fey. These seem more like modern lefty traits than the sinisterness that has historically defined lefties.

Betty Draper writes a note in Mad Man and reveals her leftiness. That she has such flowing penmanship and can write elegantly without canting the paper sideways seems to say something of her fey, chaotic, manipulative character. Writing is the best way to observe an actor’s left-handedness. But how often does someone write longhand on TV these days? If ever? Much, much more frequent is gunplay.

The evil, psychopathic, left-handed Dr. Gel, from Space Dandy

Guns—pistols and long guns alike—are made for righties. Left-handed guns are expensive and uncommon. I doubt any army issues them. Due to all sorts of tropes and conventions of film and TV, one rarely sees someone take aim carefully and strike a target in the same frame. Even if this is the case, an actual bullet has probably not been fired on camera. Not only that, but I suspect which hand a character holds a pistol in has more to do with stage blocking and fight choreography than the actor’s dominant hand.

So to keep my list of left-handed people I see on TV, I usually have to spot them writing longhand. I corroborate my list by forgetting I’d written down their names and finding them already on the list when I go to add them. Somehow it seems to make natural sense that Ben Stiller, Woody Harrelson, and Bruce Campbell are left-handed. In Fringe, John Noble who played Walter Bishop, and Joshua Jackson, who played his son, are both lefties. It suits the series well. Though they should have been righties in the alternate universe. Martin Freeman would seem to be a lefty. He plays Watson on Sherlock. It seems perfect to me—Watson is the ostensible chronicler of Sherlock’s cases and the right-hand man to the uncanny detective. I noticed Will Ferrell was left-handed when his character punched a baby in the face in The Campaign. Tuvok the Vulcan and Data the android from different Star Treks are left-handed. Probably the actors too. Nimoy, as Spock, disappointingly, uses his right hand when he gives the “Live long and prosper” salute.

I think its terribly unfortunate that Dexter wasn’t left-handed. It would have been witty, but he’s not. You can tell from the first moments of the opening title sequence, even. Sinestro, the evil guy from Green Lantern, has to be left-handed. It’s his chief character trait. I think he was played as a lefty in the movie; he’s been reliably left-handed in the comics. I’m not sure what hand the other GLs wear their rings on, probably the left—they’d probably say they’re married to their jobs.

Bart Simpson is the most notable lefty in all of television. This is remarkable, since he’s animated. Like with Sinestro, it’s a conscious decision on the part of the makers of the show and not the result of the actor’s dominant hand. Each episode begins with him writing on the chalk board and the implication is that his leftishness is a manifestation of his gauche impishness. The other notably left-handed character on that series is Ned Flanders who is so left-handed he owns the Leftorium, a store whose very concept is played for laughs. His lefty-ness defines him as well, but it’s the opposite of Bart’s. Ned’s leftism is portrayed as quaint and old-fashioned, sort of like his mustache. But it’s his income, too.

There’s one more lefty I know of who was “drawn that way”: Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon. He’s a Viking boy who hides his handedness so he’ll fit in. Vikings, like many other cultures, connoted the left with weakness and deviousness, and of course ass-wiping. He’s “cack-handed.”

A TV show’s characters’ left-handedness is sometimes a hackneyed plot device in procedurals. It’s so derivative that it’s probably been blacklisted now, but it’s not hard to envision McMillan and/or Wife saying “Wait a minute! These stab wounds indicate a left-handed killer!” And McMillan and/or Wife responding, “That’s right, husband and/or wife, and the Chauffeur’s shoelaces on his left oxford were broken and knotted back together! That must mean he’s left-handed!” We lefties are all aware of this, I imagine. We’ve long since incorporated ambidextrousness into our capers.

The character who is most criminally charmingly left-handed in a recent film is Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom. She not only stabs someone with her left hand but does it with her lefty scissors. Not only that, but she writes an entire letter with excellent penmanship with her left hand. This turns out to be excellent acting. Kara Hayward, who played Suzy is actually right handed. She had to learn write lefty. This was when I broke my anti-lefty actor Googling rule. I wanted to know whether Wes Anderson accommodated her or she had to switch hands for him.

Just a couple nights ago I watched 22 Bullets, where Jean Reno is wounded in his right arm and is forced to become a lefty. To avenge this, he shoots a lot of people. I wonder if Reno is a lefty?

So, what should we learn from this obvious fact that some people are left-handed and that some of those people are actors? Chiefly, it is that almost all of these adult characters are killers. Even Ned Flanders. And the kids are all in training. Every one of these characters, young and old, is considered to be a psychopath at some point. And that I am keeping a list.

And if I see anyone stealing my idea for the next YA blockbuster series (Teenage girl hides her left-handedness from the rest of the village, which has fared poorly in the future dystopia. She has to fight for life and for her clan, even though they disowned her when the overlords discovered her handedness during a beauty contest/gladiator fight) your name is going on my list of short-lived righties.