December 13, 2000

right and left

What connection is there among the disparate senses of the word right? How has it come to mean 'correct', 'the opposite of left', and (as a noun) 'an entitlement or claim'?

Arnie Kurczaba and R. Rodek both asked about the political senses of left wing and right wing.

The basic sense of right is 'straight' or 'stretched out'. It derives from the Indo-European root *reg- and gives us hundreds of words through Greek oregein 'to stretch out' and orektos 'stretched out' and Latin regere 'to lead straight', therefore 'to guide or rule' and rogare 'to stretch out one's hands for', therefore 'to ask', as well as rectus 'straight'. French droit 'right' or 'law' comes from Latin directum 'legal right'. I could fill a page with cognates!

The adjective, variously spelled reht, riht, or ryht, appeared in English in the ninth century. The literal sense of 'straight' had already been extended to mean 'upright' or 'righteous': "Swoet & reht [is] dryten" wrote a ninth-century translator of Psalm 25 'Good and upright is the Lord'. It also had the sense of 'correct and proper' in Old English. The noun riht or ryht was used by Bede to mean 'law', by King Alfred to mean 'one's duty', and by the Beowulf poet to mean 'that which is morally just'.

Right was also used to mean 'legal or moral title or claim' as early as 900. By the thirteenth century, people spoke of someone's "right to" something: "A fals king that nadde no right to the kindom" (Robert of Gloucester, 1297). The plural form meaning the permission to publish an author's work, as in serial rights, was first used in the 1890s: "Harper & Co. bought the serial rights for American [sic] and paid me" (Kipling, letter, 1890).

The term right hand, meaning the hand which is for the majority of people the stronger one, was used as early as the tenth century. It came to be considered the "right" hand because the majority of people use that hand. The word was extended to refer to that side of the body and to corresponding parts of other objects.

As a verb, right meant 'to make staight' or 'to guide' in Old English. The sense of "righting a wrong" appeared in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare wrote in Titus Andronicus: "I am Revenge sent from below, to join with him and right his heinous wrongs."

Left comes from a Germanic root meaning 'weak or worthless'. It is found in the Old English word lyftadl 'paralysis' and was used to refer to the less-used hand by the early thirteenth century and then extended to that side of the body.

The political senses of right and left originated in the French National Assembly of 1789: the nobles, who were conservative, were seated on the presiding officer's right (the côté droit), and the members of the Third Estate, who favored sweeping reforms, were seated on his left (the côté gauche). In legislative assemblies in Continental Europe, the more conservative members are still usually seated to the president's right. The terms "right wing" and "left wing" come from military usage.

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