The meaning and origin of 'cack handed'

Community General Discussion
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I come from the East Midlands in the UK, which has a local dialect. My bother is left handed and refers to left handed people as 'cack handed'. He thinks the term is local to the East Midlands. He is sure he didn't get it from our dad, who was born in Manchester and grew up in Blackpool.

To my surprise a contributor here from Canada also uses the same term for a left handed person. This surprises me because I would not expect the UK and Canada to have the same local dialect terms for anything!

I asked a friend and he said:

I don’t but I would guess it had to do with using the left hand ‘for not eating food’ ie the left hand had post eating food duties.

Any insight into the origin of the term might be interesting.

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After you figure that out, maybe you can explain to me why Minnesotans refer to something not quite right as "cattywumpus." :slight_smile:

Use it in a sentence: "I lent him my bike and he had an accident. Now the handlebars are all cattywumpus!"

Synonym: kittywumpus

Not to be confused with kittycorner.

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Apparently the phrase refers to the fact that before cutlery was common people would eat with their right hand and use their left hand to clean up the "cack" left on their nether regions after using the toilet

Of course, this may not be true ...

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  • I’ve always understood southpaws are: inelegant super inelegant intelligent, handsome, hard working, perceptive, and modest. :nerd_face:
    Oh and poor spellers. :pleading_face:

  • In the olden days to stop you from using your left hand, the teacher would tie your left hand behind your back or wrap your hand with one of those long pointer sticks with a hard rubber tip. :scream:

  • Don’t get me started on scissors though. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

  • Lefties use toilet paper :sunglasses:
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I had never heard the term so I asked chatGPT and it explained (after a bit of prompt work)

The exact first usage of the term "cack-handed" in literature is difficult to pinpoint. It appears to have emerged in the early 20th century, but there is no definitive record of the very first author or work to use it.

However, it is widely acknowledged that the term gained popularity in British English and was used by P.G. Wodehousein his writings, particularly in the 1930s. His use of "cack-handed" in novels like "The Code of the Woosters" (1938) helped cement its place in British slang, but he likely wasn't the first to coin it. It's possible that the phrase was already in spoken usage before it appeared in print.

The term is primarily used in British English to describe someone who is clumsy or awkward. The word "cack" is an informal slang term for feces, which gives the phrase a connotation of messiness or ineptitude.

One theory about its origin suggests that "cack-handed" could have derived from the association of left-handedness with awkwardness in earlier times, as left-handed people were often considered less skillful or "messy" in their movements. However, there's no direct evidence to link it exclusively to left-handedness. The phrase seems to have evolved to broadly describe clumsiness or uncoordinated handling of tasks.

While "cack-handed" is primarily used and understood in the UK, it may be recognized in other English-speaking regions, such as Canada and Australia, though it is not as commonly used. In these countries, people are more likely to use terms like "clumsy" or "awkward" to convey the same meaning.

Does this sound right or AI hallucinated again?

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The high school football team in Conway Arkansas has the "Wampus Cats" as its mascot.

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I was born in Manchester, as were both my parents. I'm left handed and my mum used to tell me I was cack handed whenever I was being clumsy with my hands. I didn't think it was specifically anything to do with being left handed, more to do with clumsy hand usage.

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It matches my childhood experience of the term being used to describe me being clumsy with my hands.

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I'm from North Midlands originally, went to Uni in Manchester and have worked in Yorkshire for almost 30 years. I never realised "cack handed" meant left handed. I understood it to mean clumsy, like someone who drops things frequently because they can't grip them perhaps because of the cack (excrement) on their hands.

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“caca” is a common, colloquial word used in Spanish to refer to excrement. Pronounced “cah cah”. Or “cack-a”

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same in French.

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Western Canada is “British Columbia”, eh?

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and in German: KaKa
It used when speaking to children about the otherwise unspeakable.

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Yes, I know, but within England and the wider UK there are local words in different parts of the country. Where I live a 'cob' is a small bread roll. Elsewhere Cob, cobb, or clom (in Wales) is a natural building material made from subsoil, water, fibrous organic material (typically straw), and sometimes lime. So for a local word to be the same meaning on opposite sides of the Atlantic is surprising, to me anyway.

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Well then you seriously underestimate the overlap in our populations.

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Yes, perhaps I am guilty of that.

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In dutch there is a saying:
He/she has two left hands...
Meaning that someone is the opposite of handy...

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You're good. There's not much, at least in Ontario. There's lots of historical overlap but our regional dialects are not really the same at all. "Cobs" is a bakery chain here, probably the founder's name though. Cob is the part of the plant you nibble corn off of but I don't think that's slang, that's just what it's called.

Like I say, historical influence, not really dialect, probably less so over time steadily, ever since Britain dumped us in 1867.

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Did we? Your southern neighbours make a big thing about freeing themselves from our rule, but I don't know how Canada and the UK got separated.

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Yeah, our story isn't nearly as interesting as the American Revolution.

Short version of events to which I'm referring went as follows: the Union (North) had won the American Civil War by April, 1865. After some resettling/picking up the pieces as tends to happen after any war, the Union still had a large, hardened, professional standing Army in and around New York State.

This made Britain nervous because it was known by the Americans that Britain had bet on the wrong horse: with a vested interest in seeing the United States collapse into chaos, Britain had supplied munitions to the Confederacy from the eastern colonies of Nova Scotia, Lower Canada (Newfoundland today) and New Brunswick along the eastern seaboard by sea.

Keep in mind that these colonies were largely Loyalists, many of whom whose ancestors had settled there after America won Independence.

Toronto bankers, also British colonials, helped finance this whole business and Abraham Lincoln knew that, too. In fact, he wanted to attack Canada during the Civil War because of it but he knew that fighting on two fronts would be catastrophic for the Union.

So in light of all this, Britain figured that America might take another run at Canada after the zero-sum outcome of the War of 1812. Britain's professional Army in the colonies of Canada was expensive, and the colonies were run by British subjects after all, so after floating the idea around in Canada between the Premiers of the colonies, it went to a vote among the people living there, with the first four Provinces of Canada (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec forming Confederation in 1867).

The key detail; however, is that the British North America Act that defined Confederation and thus the Dominion of Canada was enacted by the British Parliament on March 29, 1867, not even in Canada. It came into effect on July 1 of the same year.

Fun fact: of the four founding provinces, Nova Scotia was unique in that their Premier at the time, Charles Tupper, who had been elected in 1864, lied about the result of the general election regarding whether or not to join Confederation. He was promptly sacked come 1867 for this but still went on to become Canada's sixth Prime Minister from May 1, 1896 – July 8, 1896; the shortest tenure of any Prime Minister in Canada.

Fun Fact 2: The CBC (Canada's BBC) ran a special show in 1982 to cover the repatriation of the BNA Act, 1867, that was ratified as the Constitution Act, 1982, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. This particular document was so important to the British Parliament that they couldn't even find the original copy.

Edit (and somewhat unrelated but I think this is so interesting)--

Fun Fact 3: Ontario's first Lieutenant Governor (hey - just found a dialect similarity, we also pronounce the word lieutenant as "leftenant") John Graves Simcoe (1752 - 1806, was LG from 1791 - 1798) was a war veteran of the British side (obviously) of the American Revolutionary War.

Now Simcoe was no pushover and he was a brilliant strategist. In one particular skirmish, Simcoe and his men routed the Americans, forced them to flee. Simcoe's men wanted to destroy the enemy by shooting them in the back. Simcoe ordered his men to hold fire. The leader of the band of so-called American brigands? None other than one George Washington, yep, the George Washington.

How different might history have been but for that one military decision?

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