Corry-fisted adjective an awkward, clumsy person; left-handed
‘“Lord, when I think of the trouble poor Jamie had, from being caurry-fisted! Everybody tried to break him of it, from my parents to the schoolmaster, but he always was stubborn as a log, and wouldna budge.”’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
This old word now appears in a variety of spellings and combinations. We find it as early as 1327 in the Exchequer Rolls, where it appears in a Latin text giving Henry’s nickname: ‘Henrico dicto kerhand’.
It originally meant left-handed (car or ker meaning left) which was, rather problematically, associated in the past with awkwardness or clumsiness. The Wisdom of Solomon (1460) tells us: ‘The visdome of the wisman is in his rycht hand and the foly of the ful in his kere hand’. And Gilbert Hay, in his Book of Knychthede and the Governaunce of Princis (1456), suggests somewhat mystifyingly that one should sleep about an hour on the right side and then afterwards turn onto the left side because the left is naturally colder than the right.
John Skene’s De Verborum Significatione (second edition 1599), a glossary of legal terms, recorded, under the entry for ‘hebdomas’, that Jupiter has ‘Vpon his richt hand … the secound idoll Odhen’ while ‘upon the ker and wrang side was placed the thrid idole Frigga (Freya)’. And in 1721, Kelly’s collection of proverbs equates the left-hand road as the route to the everlasting bonfire: ‘You'll go the Car Gate yet’.
As late as 1825, Jamieson records this in his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language: ‘If you meet a car-handit, i.e. a left-handed person, or one who has flat soles, when you are setting out on a journey or excursion, there is no doubt that it will prove abortive’.
Left-handedness is also associated with awkwardness in John Carruthers’ A Man Beset (1928), where he gives this character reference: ‘He’s aye glaikin’ wi’ weemen, but naebody can say he’s ker-handit wi’ a coo’.
After all this denigration of left-handedness, the action described in Robin Jenkins’ Fergus Lamont (1979) was probably entirely justified: ‘While Miss Cochrane was writing on the blackboard Jack picked up his inkwell and, with his left hand, for he was corry-fisted, hurled it at her’.