I was having a chat with some friends and we were talking about how, in the U.S. at least, washers are usually on the left and dryers on the right and why that might be. Someone pointed out that we wash first and then we dry. But then someone else pointed out that we are sort of primed to think in left-to-right terms already since that’s the direction in which we read. So here is my question:
Are washers usually on the right and dryers on the left in the Middle East?
I suspect it has more to do with handedness- which is also partly why English and most western languages are written left-to-right in part because western writing systems were developed after ink or paint became the dominate means of writing over, for example, cuneiform clay or wax tablets. The reason for the switch was that ink would smudge in left-to-right.
In that regard, it might be “easier” to move things from left to right for most people (sorry lefties,) also most manufactures set it up to be moved in that direction and arrange the hinges to be set on that; and while it probably doesn’t really matter, it’s the order they went with. (for the record, you usually can have the doors swapped if you need to.)
Now I wonder, as a lefty, if this is why I always hate the time I have to put everything in the dryer?
I don’t think that handedness plays a huge role. I think that in some cases it’s simply random, and in other cases it’s “we write in this direction because that’s how we learned it”.
Inkwriting exists since at least the 2500 BCE, it was already used with hieroglyphs, and yet you see those being written left to right, right to left, boustrophedon, it’s a mess. Even with the Greek alphabet, people only stopped using boustrophedon so much around 300 BCE or so.
Plus if it played a role we’d see the opposite of what we see today - since the Arabic abjad clearly evolved among people who wrote with ink, that’s why it’s so cursive. In the meantime the favourite customary writing medium for Latin was wax tablets, where smudging ink is no issue: