[cperciva]

To the people downvoting labster's comment: He's making a joke about left-handedness being referred to as "sinister" due to the Latin origins (apparently this may originate from how Romans wore their togas). He's not saying that teachers are making children any less evil.

[djexjms]

Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right.

[rob74]

Yeah, if you think about it, this is a "discrimination" deeply enbedded in pretty much every language - or at least languages with European roots, not sure about others: "right" always has positive connotations (being right, human rights, words like "dexterity" etc.) while "left" has negative ones (not as often, but often enough, like the "sinister" mentioned by the other comment).

[labster]

I often wonder if it would be best for English to lose grammatical gender entirely. Encoding assumptions about gender is leading to endless debates about pronouns which other languages avoid entirely.

[ks2048]

In Wiktionary,

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinister#Latin

it shows a few definitions of "sinister" in Latin that seem contradictory. "left", "perverse/bad", but "auspicious" for Romans, while "inauspicious" for Greeks. And a Proto-Indo-European source which is positive.

[Telemakhos]

The PIE source is positive, because it was applied as a euphemism in Latin to what would have been laevus (cf. Greek λαιός), from the PIE word for "left." The Greeks, too, preferred euphemism to the direct term for "left": the much more common term ἀριστερά ("left") is a constrastive/comparative derived from ἄριστος, "best," so it means the "bester side."

[card_zero]

Noa-names, a precaution against things like accidentally summoning a bear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name

[ks2048]

Interesting. I knew Spanish izquierda (left) came from Basque, but I didn't realize it was to avoid a taboo word like sinister.

[card_zero]

These are euphemisms to avoid another euphemism, as the other poster says, sinister itself starting out as positive. The ancient euphemism treadmill.