~New Crowds of Friends, Auld Acquaintances, and a Whole
Bunch of People Be Forgot~
[The Giverny Life quod vide]
[Disclaimer: Since ‘hard-of-hearing’ is just awkward to
keep typing out, and ‘HoH’ just seems a bit too jolly and/or insulting to
women, many times I’ll probably just to use the word ‘deaf’ as an ad hoc word du jour for all parts of the spectrum of hearing loss. I’m likely headed there anyway. In the end, we’re all headed there, really.]
Part I: The
Social Animal
The lady,
festooned in flowerprint and mascara heavy enough to break a moderately cheap
scale, hovered just to my left and back.
As a (quickly going) deaf person, I’d long since begun noticing everything going on around
me, especially in the peripherals.
Normally, some quiet instinct at the back of my mind tells me what is
significant and what isn’t. Most things
fall firmly into the latter category; generally speaking, people don’t even
realize how many of their fellow human beings their brains dismiss as
unimportant without even so much as a moment of sincere reflection on the
matter. Ancillary to this, even fewer of
our fellow human beings realize how constantly, and abruptly, they’re being
dismissed any time they’re in public with strangers. The human ego rarely likes to dwell on this
natural state of affairs.
In most circumstances, my mind would
have considered this lady worth nothing more than a quick note: She’s
there. She’s wearing a floridly floral dress. She is of no interest to us. Also, that much lavender really needs
something darker to offset it. A black full-body
burka, perhaps. Indeed, my mind
gamely attempted to do exactly that. Had
somebody approached me from the right with a greeting and, after a beat, asked
me who was to my left, my mind would likely have already forgotten the
answer. The area was filled with
people. Strangers, acquaintances,
friends, family, and (the clear majority) people who obviously fell into one of those categories but I’d be
damned if I knew which. This lady
resided quite firmly in the patchwork quilt of people I couldn’t identify on a
dare. Not that anyone bothered to dare
me on that point, and given that my hearing (specifically, the lack of) made
closing the knowledge gap stressful at best, I wasn’t anticipating changing
that state of affairs any time soon.
But something buzzed at the back of
my mind, warning me that this lady was approaching far too fast and far too deliberately
to continue ignoring for much the same reason that a military base can’t
continue blithely ignoring an approaching cruise missile no matter how strongly
they feel about wanting to remain unacquainted with it.
A best-case scenario had her simply
offering a sentiment apparent in her expression, or at least as apparent as it
could be when her expression had to fight through several layers of make-up to
reach the outside world. She’d say
something in the properly sympathetic tone, I’d murmur something back in a
properly appreciative tone, and we’d both move on with our lives.
Let me make something clear about
what I’ve learned as my hearing slips away – the best-case scenario for a deaf
person is like winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. The odds ain’t good is what I’m trying to
say. Also, no matter badly you need this
lotto win, or its metaphorical equivalent, to happen, you’re likely going to go
to bed that night regretting your choices.
As any deaf
person can tell you, meeting new people can be a bit stressful. Given that approximately 99.9999% of the
human race can be considered ‘new people,’ that means you’re pretty much guaranteed
to encounter such vile specimens at least once during your day. Assuming you aren’t, you know, shackled in
someone’s basement sweatshop knitting cheap woolen knickers for sale at dollar
stores.
If you are, well, you have bigger
problems than me and much of what I’m writing here will not apply to your
situation in any way. Sorry.
Even
meeting old friends can be stressful simply because you care whether you’re
inconveniencing them. Though, if they’re
good sort of friends, the sort that doesn’t try to drug you so they can steal
your kidneys to sell on the International Kidney and Particularly Vibrant and
Colorful Spleens Black Market, meeting with them is certainly nowhere near as
stressful as meeting new people.1
Growing up with at least some
hearing socializes us to a degree we hardly realize until circumstances force
us to deal with the fallout of losing access to this socialization. It’s a hearing person’s planet, and sound
ranks right up there with sight and sensation as an essential tool for
navigating the world around us. So much
of what we take for granted in our interactions with others hangs on the
slenderest of threads.
Obviously,
social gatherings are a pitfall, especially social gatherings involving a mix
of friends, acquaintances, and people who never had the chance to become either
your friend or acquaintance prior to the occasion. That last group, more succinctly known as
“scary and possibly vulgarly-inclined strangers” (I didn’t say a lot more succinctly) are what truly send
the situation spiraling out of control.
In
any event, as bad as your average social gathering can be for a deaf person,
however, there are some social gatherings that eclipse these minor
annoyances. These events make strong men
and women weep, and weepy men and women…more weepy, I guess. We stare blankly at the endless despair, sigh
at the insanity until we go mad ourselves, and, in the right conditions, strip
down and race naked through lamp stores at the Galleria. (Don’t ask, and definitely don’t tell. Please.)
These gatherings are like the outermost reaches of ancient maps of the
Ocean Deep, places of turmoil and terror.
Hunt sic dracones.
I
am, of course, referring to bachelor parties.
Actually,
no, just funerals, such as the one I attended with the above-mentioned Floral
Lady. But all this also applies to
bachelor parties. I can tell you from no
small amount of experience, bachelor parties are horrifying circumstances
regardless of one’s capacity to hear. The
ones I’ve found myself at have managed to violate the integrity of pretty much
every possible philosophical approach to living, and quite a few impossible
ones as well. I understand bachelorette
parties can descend into madness as well, but, sadly, or perhaps happily, I’ve
garnered very few invitations to those
events. Apparently straight males are
not considered de rigueur items for
the guest list. One assumes the
inevitable presence of penises in various edible varieties don’t mesh well with
some guy sitting over to the side refusing to place one in his mouth for
whatever homophobic reason.2
Moving
on…
A funeral
gives you the worst of both worlds when it comes to meeting with people. You’ll be surrounded by a whole bunch of
people who recognize you while you don’t recognize them back. Ostensible friends and acquaintances treat
you as someone they’re perfectly comfortable being familiar with you, and once a fervent
hug has been engaged, there’s really no tactful way to return the hug and ask: And
just who the hell are you?
I’ve
tried several different approaches. It
simply can’t be done. It’s like the
Thirteenth Labor of Hercules, the one that made him finally punch a wall and
retreat to a nice Grecian spa for a rest cure and maybe some erotic
experimentation to take his mind off that damned Thirteenth Labor.
To
complicate things, not returning the hug at a good old-fashion Southern funeral
simply isn’t an option unless you want to shame your family, your friends, and
possibly innocent bystanders who just happened to be a little bit too close
when you chose not to return the hug.
Now, a decent-sized funeral is a
crowded affair, with lots of cliques. Friends
of the deceased, relations of the deceased, friends of relations of the
deceased, church friends of the deceased, work friends of the deceased, Rotary
Club friends of the deceased, specifically non-Rotary Club friends of the
deceased, random people who seem to have just wandered in and have no
connection to the deceased whatsoever but are willing to take a chance on love,
Funeral Mimes (I assume these exist), and so on. All of these groups swirling and momentarily
unmingling to talk to members of other cliques transforms the entire affair
into one massive game of Charades mixed in with a highly-ritualized system of
Freeze Tag. When a member of any one of
the groups manages to catch you alone, and they will, you’re trapped in a
situation where they’re either completely unaware of your handicap, or they’re
absolutely aware of it and take special measures to compensate, such as looking
you very sincerely in the eyes and hoping that the words coming from their
mouth will somehow become intelligible if they just stare you down hard enough.
In case you’re wondering, this doesn’t
work nearly as well as people think. It’s
all quite the tragicomic mise-en-scene,
in fact.
Barring
going back in time and killing your younger self before you meet the deceased
person in question – which can be problematic when it’s a parent involved – your
best hope is to have someone willing to follow you everywhere and take pains to
ensure you find out who you’re talking to.
This requires a friend with one of two abilities:
1 1) The prescience to see approaching bear hugs and
somehow manage to convey the identity of the possessor of the arms in question
before they reach you. Whatever method
they choose should not leave permanent scars on your body;
or
2 2) The derring-do to immediately engage the hugger in
conversation once the clinch has been, well, unclenched. By distracting the hugger, the person thus
averts any chance the hugger might see the look of utter confusion on your
face. Then, once the hugger has left,
your friend can tell you who he or she was at a leisurely pace. Or at least until the next hugger comes
along. Word to the wise: these affairs are chockful of huggers seeking
huggees, and no-one escapes.
No-one.
The
difficulty with this tactic is that anyone likely to have a broad knowledge of
all parties involved is also likely to be closely related to the deceased and
thus hobbled with his or her own social responsibilities both before and after
the ceremony. They have their own people
to meet, their own condolences to accept, their own endless rage to quench with
recklessly fortified Wild Turkey. They’re
not likely to have either the time or the inclination follow you around like a
Deaf Translator Valet. Or a Funeral
Mime.
No,
I’m not letting go of that idea. I’ve
had a right miserable spring – or five years, depending on where you start
measuring – and I’m inexplicably tickled by the image of a Funeral Mime. Anything that makes me a bit happier
stays.
We
good on this issue?
Don’t
bother answering. I don’t care whether
you think so or not. We’re good and
that’s how it has to be. Tell your
friends. Spread the word.
The
culmination of this tawdry parade of incomprehension mixed with sad embraces
took place directly after the funeral.
We (the closest relations of the deceased) left the chapel first, as was
convention3, and loitered around outside as the rest of the
attendees followed. There were quite a
lot of them, sufficient to fill up the church, and I made a point of demurring
any possibility of standing in a receiving line. Luckily, such a line either didn’t happen or
happened at a completely different location, possibly another church, so I made
a point of wandering off for a quick and necessary cigarette to deal with my
feelings about, well, everything that had happened since the beginning of time.
And possible at the pre-show leading up to the beginning of time. Minus the parts I was asleep for, of course.
As I
made a good angle for the rear of the church, a significant amount of floral
fabric confronted me with a deftness that suggested the wearer of said fabric –
for the fabric was not wandering around by itself, in case that wasn’t clear –
had experience cutting off fleeing prey for pleasure or gain.
Before
I could react, two arms wrapped around me in a hug that seemed unnecessarily
forceful in the same way a crocodile clamping down on a wayward piece of tulle
would be unnecessarily forceful.
But
with more sincerity. I’ll give her
that. She was way more sincere than your
average crocodile, tears notwithstanding.
She said something to me that I
couldn’t understand. Mind you, she said
it quite loudly, but even if my hearing weren’t impaired, that much patterned
fabric wrapped around one’s face must inevitably block all manner of
sound. It’s just science, right? Loud colors are the white noise of the oddly
synesthesian world surrounding our moments of greatest grief, deaf and non-deaf
alike.
If that last sentence made sense to
you, I’m very glad at least one other person on this planet understands the
surreality that accompanies periods of intense mourning.
Finally, she released me and
continued talking. No matter what sorts
of sympathetic noises I made, no matter how confused I looked, no matter what
hints I dropped about not being able to hear, no matter how many times I dialed
911 in search of anyone in a uniform and willing exert authority on my behalf,
she slogged courageously on. There are
entire railyards filled with Little Engines That Could that hold only a tiny
fraction of this woman’s dogged insistence.
Finally,
she stopped and swept me up in a hug again.
While I appreciated that she was trying to make me feel better, or share
my pain, or check my body for hidden weapons, or whatever (honest, I really did
appreciate it because I’m not a jackass), I couldn’t help but wonder how this
experience would play out if I could understand a damned word she said.
(Incidentally, just to be clear, I'm certainly not adverse to touching and feeling. Most of my friendships have been strongly touchy-feely and I quite liked it that way. But I was a little put off by the lack of any proper introduction.)
I
could, however, understand her perfume.
It said, loudly enough to shatter nasal passageways with the might of a
mountain of cocaine, that she was damned determined to smell like jasmine
despite having no idea what jasmine actually smells like. It was distinct enough that I could tell it
was supposed to be jasmine. It was also
distinct enough I could tell that somebody at the parfumerie’s quality control department seriously dropped the ball
at some point along the production process. When they say other senses improve
to compensate for the loss of one sense, they’re usually strangely silent of
the issue of misguided perfumes.
I
can’t imagine how this gets left out of the medical literature on the topic,
but it does.
This scene repeated itself more than
once over the course of the afternoon.
Most of the instances weren’t nearly as floral and florid as this;
still, they left me wondering if I was at the wrong funeral. Questions abounded, and not all of them
rhetorical.
To
wit:
Who are these people?
and
How was I going to find a clear answer to the
preceding question?
Also,
possibly:
What monster devised the concept of tucked-in button-up
shirts not made of fluffy clouds and kitten purrs?
That
last, admittedly, lacked gravitas but
it certainly plagued my thoughts the whole afternoon, especially in light of the 80 degree weather. I'm a sweater, you see; having lived in some of the hottest, most humid environments in America, the heat doesn't bother me, but I still sweat.
Crowds of
strangers can be particularly stressful for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. You find yourself essentially relegated to
your own circumscribed world – not exactly an anomaly for people with poor
hearing, as any deaf person can attest – but the compulsion to adhere to social
conventions and mores isn’t easily sublimated.
Especially if your condition wasn’t always that bad. I’ve spent the majority of my life capable of
operating in these situations. Not
always perfectly, but usually adequately enough to have a good circle of
friends and a wide variety of crazed keggers in my past. When you’re used to being able to socialize
relatively freely, being forced by new circumstances to unlearn a lifetime’s
worth of easy familiarity and casual contact can be wearying at the very least,
and downright discomforting a painfully large percentage of the time.
At my core, I’m a Southern boy,
born, bred, and occasionally fed. Being
polite, or at least feigning it on occasions when the struggle to feel
genuinely concerned about my current surroundings overwhelms my instincts,
springs from a deep personal and cultural node in my psyche.4
This proves problematic when social
mores dictate you show sincere interest in what the other person has to offer,
be it speech, emotion, validation, or off-brand Moon Pies.5 An
enforced life on the margins, at the intersection of society and solitude with
no comfortable resting place on either side, is a bit precarious. For every person I shared a moment of genuine
mutual recognition with at the funeral, an (apparent) stranger just plowed into
me with reckless abandon and apparent life-long yearning for my love and
respect. Because I couldn’t really
understand them, basic conversation allowing me to discern their identities
while maintaining a façade of knowing exactly who they were all along simply
wasn’t feasible.
It’s play-acting. The fact that deaf people aren’t better
represented in Hollywood is astounding given the inevitable necessity of
developing significant acting skills if we want to maintain any semblance of
normalcy in public. Most of us, if we
don’t want to become hermits fall into a familiar routine in such
circumstances. We play at understanding,
dance deftly (and not-so-deftly) around the misunderstandings, and move through
this world with endless pretense at being perfectly satisfied with how our
interactions went. Though we wonder if
we missed an opportunity to achieve something or failed to learn something we
could use, something at the back of our mind keeps our uncertainty hidden.
People
don’t like feeling as though they expended all that time and energy in
conversation with us to no worthwhile end.
This may not be fair to those of us who have little control over either
our personal circumstances or the choices of others in engaging in the
conversation in the first place, but it is understandable. Deaf people don’t care for that either. Except in our case, most attempts at
conversation pretty much tend to go that way.
Tis our cross to bear.
We
leave a considerable percentage of our interactions with a vague sense that we
simply survived rather than benefitted. I
won’t pretend that’s a pleasant feeling.
Part II: The Social
Vegetable
There’s a
school of thought, called Communication Accommodation Theory, that suggests
that, in conversation, we tend to either diverge from each other, or eventually
converge with each other. Conversationally-speaking,
not protoplasmically-speaking, that is.
In
essence, we habitually (and frequently completely-subconsciously) either mirror
or oppose our conversation partner.
People with strong egos and self-identification markers will tend to
diverge. They want to establish their
own discrete role; sometimes that involves imposing their own personality on
the conversation, sometimes it just means a need for a meeting of separate but
equal. Humanity being what it is, the
former seems to be far more common than the latter. This…need, this hunger for distinction drives
great learning, and equally-great failure.
We want to be the smart one, or at least the lucid one. Or we want to be the fun one, the loved one,
the interesting one, the one who invites further conversation. We want validation for being ourselves, so we
push for it. Sometimes too hard, but
that’s a matter of judgment, not socialization.6
While the divergence aspect certainly
has relevance, especially when I’m generally the only hard-of-hearing person in
any given conversation, it’s convergence that interests me here. Traditionally, convergence is associated with
a disparity of power. One speaker
dominates, the other speaker seeks to placate or acquiesce to the dominant
speaker. One half (or more, or less,
depending on how many people are involved) clearly controls the direction of
the conversation, which leads to the other(s) essentially being
sublimated. Ergo, convergence.
Interactions symptomatic of
convergence theory have never been my oeuvre,
either as the dominant or submissive partner in a conversation. While it’s entirely true that I do have a
very strong personality, and I can (quite accidentally, usually) intimidate people
if I’m not paying careful attention – we all have serious flaws, and that’s one
of mine – I feel a genuine and almost visceral distaste for this sort of thing. I wouldn’t call myself egalitarian as such,
primarily because that transforms the ideation into a philosophical concept rather
than a purely personal one.7
Nevertheless, I have traditionally had little use for friendships or
relationships with people who can’t or won’t challenge me. That’s not friendship, that’s inequity.
But the nature of deafness almost
requires an imbalance of power in interactions.8 Either the person who can’t hear loses the
nuances, or even the entire point of the conversation, or the person who can
must take extraordinary, and frequently deferential, measures to maintain
communication. Long familiarity can
mitigate these symptoms of conversational imbalance, obviously. But so many of our interactions on a daily basis take place on far less intimate terms.
People we barely know in passing, or service workers, or just random
encounters all involve an immediate situational assessment unsupported by any
sort of experiential foundation.
It may surprise some, but I find the
excessive deference more unpleasant than excessive inability to adjust to the
situation. Best of intentions aside, I can't escape the nagging sensation that it's a little insulting. There’s a reason why
the convergence theory isn’t considered a description of healthy implementation
of conversational accommodation. Not to
take an overly proscriptivist approach, excessive accommodation becomes fairly problematic
in the context of the discussion of meeting strangers and ostensible
acquaintances. You don’t want to come
away from these encounters with a sense that you were their Good Deed for the
Day.
This
is not to accuse them of necessarily being unthinking, self-serving, or
malicious in this context. Quite the
opposite (generally speaking, given that there are some real sons-of-bitches in
this variegated old world of ours.) But
such behavior emphasizes the inequity of conversational influence, and when a
conversation becomes altruism, the conversation essentially dies on the stalk. Rather than ignore the difficulties of the
deaf and hard-of-hearing, the person shines a spotlight on them, makes them
central to the power dynamic.
The
inherent Catch-22 of what I’m saying isn’t in any way lost on me; my sardonic
commentary on the approach of people who aren’t making allowances for a person
who has no convenient way to engage in an exchange of information (say, name
and relationship to yours truly) undercuts any commentary about acquaintances
who makes excessive allowance. I’m not
unaware of how this disconnect can easily become a rather vicious contrariness.
Nevertheless,
people tend to be excessively polar when (and only when) it suits them.
Humans aren’t well-equipped psychologically to allow other people the
benefit of the continuum of truth.
Either/or argumentation is perhaps the most invidious and dangerous
logical fallacies available to us, partly because of its dogmatism, partly
because it’s so ubiquitous.
Given
that a considerable amount of intellectual territory lies between the extremes
of callous insensitivity and excessive obsequiousness, the claim of a logical
disconnect between criticizing both approaches is facile. At best.
At
its overanalyzed heart, the question of the communication power dynamic shapes
the lives of virtually everyone, handicapped and non-handicapped alike. Deaf people don’t possess some special
prerogative in that regard. We’re
perfectly capable of imposing our own dominance on a conversation, just as any
other person can. We just have certain
nuances to consider that most people don’t.9
Is there a useful solution? Are rhetorical questions annoying and
pointless? Does God play dice with the
universe? The answer to two of these
three questions is ‘maybe.’ I’ll leave
it up to you to decide which two.
Normally,
I’d at least try to synthesize some sort of resolution out of all this, be it a
revelation, an understanding, an insight du
jour, or just a realization that there can be no satisfactory revelations, understandings
or insights du jour to this
predicament.
That’s not entirely true. The latter part is true. The former part, however, as anyone who knows
me well could attest, isn’t. What I
should have said is the normally most
people would try to find some sort of resolution here. That has rarely been my style, let alone my
impetus. But what’s the point,
really? No Great Truths ever fixed a
problem. They just make the speakers of these
Truths feel self-satisfied. Nobody,
least of all me, should begrudge them that, of course. We all want satisfaction in life, after all,
and if someone gets satisfaction from feeling smarter or wiser, more power to
that person.
I
just prefer my satisfaction to be less nebulous in cases like this. Nothing wrong with the universal
insights. I like them as much as the
next human being. I mean, I don’t have
cat posters or anything, but I can still appreciate their ability to stir
something within us. When all is said
and done, however, we have to actually live our lives, with all the
complications and derivations and occasional mastications10 implied
therefrom.
Knowing
a profundity doesn’t actually help in dealing with people I can’t understand,
after all.
So if you need a Great Truth, here’s
the best I can do: Learn what jasmine
smells like before picking a perfume.
Just…learn. Please. Don’t be that person who walks around
thinking they smell like fresh jasmine rather than like jasmine fresh off a twelve day bender that ended up
sleeping it off in Hoboken.
It
never ends well for the rest of us, you see. If there’s one Great Truth to be
learned – and there isn’t – it’s that we could all stand to be more discerning
with our eau de toilettes.
Works for me.
~Fin~
Footnotes:
1) I pity people who never got a chance to know
me, incidentally. They missed out on
some really terrible puns I’ve told all my friends and acquaintances. These poor people will never know the
exquisite joy of hating me and plotting my agonizing death for telling them
such an awful joke. On a semi-related
note, I really think I need a less unsettling class of friends and acquaintances. Any recommendations will be welcome. Since the only personal information I will
hand out – other than this whole damned blog, that is – will be that I live in
Greensboro, N.C., and I’m not exactly champing at the bit to get myself
murdered by unscrupulous Netizens that accidentally stumble over this, actually
tailoring a recommendation to suit my needs might be a bit tough. But you’re welcome to try anyway.
Also, the only person likely to
ever read this knows exactly who I am and where I live. So….
2)
I will not bother protesting that I’m
not actually homophobic. Anyone who
knows me knows I’m not, and anyone who doesn’t won’t be convinced by the
disclaimer. And, frankly, unless some
member of the latter group has the power of life and death over me, I’m not
actually all that concerned with their opinion.
I
will, however, observe that I’m in that sweet spot of having had enough gay
friends that I feel comfortable making jokes about gay people but not so many
gay friends that I inevitably know one that would stab me for making such
insensitive jokes. It’s a good place to
be, my friends. A good place to be.
3)
I’m not entirely clear on what this
convention is meant to do if we’re not being forced to receive other
mourners. It’s not a place of
honor. The only place of honor at a funeral
is in the casket or urn.
4) I do have
reasoned, philosophical motives for being polite as well, which are perhaps
even more fundamental to my behavior than the learned aspects. That’s a discussion for another essay,
though, one which I will likely write soon.
“Soon” being extremely relative, and I won’t commit to what it’s
relative to in this instance just yet.
5) There’s no
such thing as a good off-brand Moon Pie.
That particular blend of tastiness, marshmallowiness, and utter
self-loathing at having eaten such a thing cannot be properly replicated by any
other product. This same logic also
applies to sex, no matter how vociferously some of you might protest
6) Most people
like to think they’re fundamentally decent, that the more unpleasant aspects of
our personalities do not reflect the Real Us, the person we would want to be
treated as before whatever Final Judgment we might find ourselves facing. At the same time, most of us also do not want
to extend the same courtesy to acquaintances and strangers. We’re a hypocritical lot, we are.
Some
of us like to feel somehow better because we at least acknowledge the
hypocrisy. We’re just fooling
ourselves. Am I better person for
acknowledging both the hypocrisy and the fact that I’m just fooling myself?
This
rabbit hole goes ∞ deep. That way lies
madness.
7) As should be
obvious to anyone who’s bothered reading what I write, I have an animus against
excessive philosophizing. Sometimes I
think the only reason I went to grad school was to destroy the system from
within. Given that I’m clearly good at
the nuances of philosophical natterings, there may be a self-destructive
element. Or maybe not. I’m going to take a stand against pointless
psychoanalysis as well…just because I can.
And
I know friends have found my repudiation of philosophy rather odd, given that I
know more about it than 99% of the population, and am quite willing to discuss philosophy. I just don’t care to actually apply it to my
own thoughts unless necessary. It’s just
my own cute little quirk. It is cute,
right? Maybe?
8) This
phenomenon is obviously not unique to hearing loss. It recurs in any interactions involving
someone with a significant handicap. I’ve
been guilty of being on the other side on occasion, in fact. But I can speak authoritatively only on
hearing loss. That’s my (generally
unwanted) métier
9) Though a
non-native speaker of the common language in an area does have some similar
issues to the deaf. In some ways, this may
be the most apt analogy to the predicament of the deaf in society
10) That word probably
doesn’t mean what you think. Just so we’re
clear. If it does, well, jolly good.
