I’m left-handed and growing up, in school, there were never enough left handed scissors between myself and the maybe two other lefties in my class so I would often need to use right-handed scissors. But they would either not cut paper at all or kind of tear the paper, forcing me to switch to my right hand to get the scissors to cut smoothly.
Just yesterday I needed to trim a label and no matter how I angled the scissors, they would not cut the paper but they immediately did once I switched to my right hand. Thus, how do scissors “know” which hand you’re holding them in?
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When you cut paper with the properly oriented scissors you create an orientation where the paper is being secured on one end with your free hand, and is secured on the other end by resting on the bottom of the scissor blade. Then the top scissor blade comes down and slices in between.
When you hold the scissors in the wrong hand, now your free hand and the bottom scissor blade are on the same side, and there is nothing secure the paper on the *other* side of the scissors. So when the top scissor blade comes down, instead of cutting the paper, it just folds it over.
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