May 15, 1996

sinister

A word question on my mind: Relationship between SINISTRAL and SINISTER. Left-handed equals evil?

Well, without wanting to offend any left-handers out there, that's a little close to the origin. But the old line that sinister means 'evil' because lefties were more likely to mess things up is only a small part of the story.

In Latin, the word meant 'on the left side', and another meaning was 'unfavorable; harmful'. But it wasn't because of clumsiness, but rather because of the direction people faced when interpreting omens: the east was considered the fortunate direction, and in the Greek practice, people faced north while prophesying, so the left side was the unlucky one. In the Roman practice, people faced south, so the left side was lucky: the word sinister in Latin thus could mean both 'lucky' and 'unlucky', according to the different traditions, but the Greek interpretation predominated, perhaps through the suggestion of left-handedness being clumsy. But the "left-handed = evil" statement is not really true, since it's not handedness that's the main point.

The early senses in English were 'false; dishonest' and later 'unlucky'; these both appeared in the early fifteenth century. The sense 'evil' shows up later in the fifteenth century, and the sense 'threatening; ominious', as in the expression "a sinister glare" does not arise until the eighteenth century.