Double, double, toil and trouble.

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Here's an etymology stumper: Originally, "weird" was not an adjective but a noun.

What did it mean?

I had this vague remembrance that it had something to do with foretelling, future, or wizardry (weird=wizard) but after a little research, that turns out to be in the park, but a foul ball.

By Shakespeare's time (as per your reference) the meaning was bridging what we know as weird, but still with a very firm hold on the archaic meaning (the weird sisters of Macbeth) and it had achieved adjectival status.

Shakespeare was very inventive with language and probably helped in some small way to create the language we now use where just about any noun can be used as an adjective. The "parts of speech" you may have learned in primary school don't really describe English words as much as "function of speech" would do.

- a girl thing
- horse power
- chick flic
- man hours
- baby carriage
- dog breath
- crap detector
- bell tower
- spirit world

ad infinitum......

Re: the word in your puzzler, "fate" is (weirdly) one "noun" not used also as an adjective. To do that we add "ful."

<<6. When was the first USA presidential debate?>

Astoundingly, according to /ibid./, this appears, formally, to have been the (in)famous (depending on your political leanings) 1960 matchup between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, now also held up as an example of the first time television might have determined the winner of a presidential race.

Informally, however, we might count the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 (which were more what I had in mind). Less national exposure these might have had, but some might say they were rather more substantive.>

No, no, no... that's exactly the point. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates were for not for the presidency, as most people assume: it was a for seat in the Illinois Senate. (When Lincoln became president he defeated one John Breckinridge of Kentucky.)

Furthermore, since senators back then were elected by the state legislature and not the public, whatever interest the public held in the Lincoln-Douglas debates was purely academic--they couldn't vote for either man if they wanted to!

A lot of "history" is like that. :-S

1. Which hand do you deal cards with, left or right?

2. Which hand to you write with, left or right?

3. When you put on trousers, which leg do you normally lift first, left or right?

4. When you fold your hands, which thumb is on top, left or right?

5. Which of your eyes is dominant, left or right? (http://www.wikihow.com/Determine-Yo...)

No. I think you're a combination lock.

Your Wikipedia link leads to an article about symmetry breaking in *physics*.

The logical linkage between this phenomenon and human neurology is not readily apparent, although if you really do have a correlation in mind, I will be most interested to consider it.

It says that <(infinitesimally) small fluctuations acting on a system which is crossing a critical point decide the system's fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken.> That's not crystalline in its clarity, but it means that if something can go either of two (or more) ways, tiny unobservable factors determine which it chooses, and once the choice is made it is irreversible.

What difference does it make whether you deal with your left or your right hand? What difference does it make whether your left or your right thumb is on top? Etc. One's as good as the other. Do you know why you do it the way you do? Something tipped the balance; what it was is unknown. Yet you -- or anyway, most people -- always do it one way. Having started doing it that way, you kept on, because, well, because that was the way you did it.

Another example is the choice of whether to drive on the left side of the road or the right. One's as good as the other, but in a given region it better be all one way, or else chaos results. (We provincial Americans tend to think that the Brits have it backwards, but if China had decided to copy Japan and go left, *we* would be in the minority.) The physics examples, though recondite, are similar.

A bit ashamed of that L.

Just kidding. My dad was a leftie. I have respected them ever since I was born.

(his political views were R, like any man of the soil who had to break his back to be a success).

Did the doctor tell you "And whatever you do, don't diss lefties" as he spanked you on your way out of the uterus?

<(his political views were R, like any man of the soil who had to break his back to be a success).>

This isn't strictly true. He *was* R until he broke his back, had to go on disability, and found that his political fellow travellers now regarded him as a leech and did their best to defund his benefits.

I thought it was something like that.

Of course, in this form, the proposition is unassailable because it remains firmly in the realm of the general and the conceptual. To really judge the idea, we'd need it fleshed out.

To me, these variables are artifacts of incomplete hemispherical dominance. Each of the "choices" corresponds in some way to "handedness," but it seems few people really are consistently right- or left-"handed."

Please elaborate on what you have in mind and by what mechanism it might work.

The most familiar physical example is that of water spiraling out of a basin. Most basins and bathtubs are symmetrical; nothing in their geometry dictates which way the vortex rotates. Instead, small random motions in the water before the drain is opened determine the sense of rotation. (Coriolis force due to Earth's rotation is negligibly small.) The factor determining the direction of rotation of dust devils is the same, chance initial disturbances.

Another example is the orientation of ions in a crystal lattice. Many metallic ions are magnetized. Since like poles repel and unlike attract, the energetically preferred orientation of an ion is opposite that of its nearest neighbors. In, say, a rectangular lattice (in 2D; think of an array like a chessboard) that means there are *two* preferred orientations, one with spins alternating up and down along ranks and files (up on the "black" locations and down on the "white"), and the other with all ions flipped. Which one the array settles down into is a matter of chance initial conditions. And of course if the array is big enough, distant regions will settle into their "choices" independently, and there will be inconsistencies ("dislocations" or "line defects") along the boundaries.

Physiological: I don't know how preferences for things like, e.g., how we fold our hands, are established. I assume it's a matter of habit reinforcing random first experiences. In the absence of data, I assume that half of all people do it one way, half the other.

And I'm sure your quesadilla was delicious — if perhaps a bit chewy. :-)

It is related to the dominance of one brain hemisphere or the other. Evidence of this is provided mostly by stroke patients, who exhibit symptoms of paralysis in the limbs *opposite* the stricken hemisphere.

Roughly 90 percent of people are left-hemisphere-dominant, which means that their right limbs will also tend to dominate. This is why most cultures favor right-handedness, sometimes even to the point of stigmatizing or pathologizing left-handedness and attempting to train children to switch hands from an early age.

There are some other consequences of this preponderance, but here we move into psychology, history and anthropology.