www.alphadictionary.com

• adroit •

Pronunciation: ê-droyt • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Dexterous, deft, nimble-fingered, artful; having skills or talents that makes doing things seem easy.

Notes: Today's Good Word comes accompanied by an adverb, adroitly, and a straightforward noun, adroitness. No spelling traps so long as you remember the OY sound is spelled oi as in Detroit.

In Play: Today's word implies "quick" and "skillful": "The shell game operator removed the pea from the table with an adroit sleight of hand without the onlookers noticing." It may be used anywhere deftness is involved: "Sara Bellum adroitly managed the webpage illustrations herself while making her presentation."

Word History: Today's Good Word comes from French adroit, a word made from the Old French phrase à "to" + droit "right (both senses of the word), direct". Droit is a direct descendant from Late Latin directum "right, justice", the accusative case of directus "straight". Directus is the past participle of the verb dirigere, a variant of deregere "to set or lay straight", comprising de "from" + regere "to keep or lead straight, to guide". This is the root of rex "king", and regal. It also produced regular which, after passing through French, was reduced to rule. English, as is its wont, borrowed this word at every step of its development, even though it had its own Germanic version of the original PIE root, right. (We now thank Albert Skiles for so adroitly recommending today's dainty Good Word.)

Dextro-, Levo- ,δεξιά, αριστερά, dextera, sinistra, adroit, gauche, right handed, left handed, rightpaw (Is there such a word?),southpaw. lefty, etc. and ad nauseam. Why does the left handed person get the short end of the stick? Why am I always thought to be out in left field? I don't even play baseball. Why the he Democrats sit on the left side?

My left handed daughter has the best penmanship of my four children. My grandson, a left handed baseball pitcher, is the star of the team. Time was when the left handed child was forced to write right handed. Earlier, a left handed child was left out in the cold to die and thus prevented from putting a hex on the community. And then there is the famous left handed monkey wrench.

I am ambidextrous. Why am I not ambigauche?

Shouldn't the antonym of southpaw be northpaw?

I recall walking into my first Russian 101 class at Bucknell. Of the 35 students, 7 were left-handers, arms curled around the desks made for right-handers and writing from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

Two or three years after I relayed this story to the provost, left-handed desks began appearing in classrooms.

Why am I always thought to be out in left field? I don't even play baseball. Why do the Democrats sit on the left side?

I’ve always wondered about the left-field expression. Maybe the distance between home plate and the left-field corner is longer than to the right-field corner? I don’t know.

I do know about the Democrats on the left side, though. In school they taught us that in the French post-revolution legislature, the liberals sat on the left side of the aisle and the conservatives on the right. So it’s mostly symbolic, though I don’t know why they stick to that over 200 years later…

I would think the center field fence would be the farthest, unless the fence is an exact curve with home plate as the center. But then there is no center in baseball, only football and sometimes basketball.

Congress needs to play fruit basket turnover and jumble them all together. Maybe they will get to know and respect each other a bit more.

I'm not even American and certainly don't watch baseball, but I did enjoy playing whilst stationed abroad when young, with an American PE teacher. I think left field is furthest from first base rather than home plate, first base being most relevant to rapidly returned balls from the field.

I suspect that in baseball, righted handed power hitters tend to hit more frequently and farther into the left field. To be in the best defensive position, the fielders would tend to shift to that side of the field and play deeper. "Way out in left field", they would be farthest from where most of the players position themselves.