~Rambling Thoughts on Learning American Sign Language~
[The Giverny
Life quod vide]
~Nemo surdior est quam is qui non audiet
Wednesday
night, and the coffee house was a-chattering, to say nothing of a-gesturing,
a-quivering and a-fluttering, with all manner of conversation. Great oaths were being sworn, petty promises
were being made, and lots of intermittent rational discussion was being had.
Or so I assumed. I actually couldn’t understand any of it.
For once, however, I could
actually tell the scope of the
conversation filling the room. It was as
noisy as a rave, with 83.6% less saturated Poor Decision Making, and yet it was
virtually silent even by my not overly strict standards. Perhaps a vague rustle in the background, the
crinkle of paper and clank of mugs against wood and squeaking scrapes of chair
legs sliding over hard tile.
None of which I could actually hear, just for the record.
To avoid accusations of coyness,
for coyness I’ve been accused of on occasion, I’ll go ahead and note that the
conversation – gestures and quivers and flutters alike – was taking place
almost entirely in sign language. I will
go ahead and say ‘American Sign Language’ (AMSLAN) because, although I couldn’t
tell AMSLAN from SLAMBAMTHANK YOUMA’AM1 at a glance, this affair was
most definitely taking place in America, with thousands of miles separating the
coffee house from the nearest foreign country.
I’ve always been excellent at
basic deduction. I'm clearly a genius at figuring out the painfully obvious. I do not feel the need for humility on that point.
Another thing I’ve always been
excellent at is wondering what the holy hell is going on.
Pursuant to this admission, I
started wondering what in the blue blazes was happening2 as I looked
around the room. For a long second, I
thought the place had been taken over by a particularly emphatic and passionate
group availing themselves of every trick in their repertoire, including wild
gestures, to get their points across.
Thanks to an impromptu drum ritual and crawfish broil I once stumbled
over in a friend’s back yard while searching for an errant kitty one sultry
spring afternoon, it wouldn’t be the first time my wanderings led me into the
belly of the Overemphatic Beast.
One can argue that I should have
realized from the fact that pretty much everyone in the coffee house was waving
fingers and hands at each other that sign language was the more obvious
conclusion. One can also argue that I’m
a blithering idiot.
Indeed, at least a couple of my
girlfriends have made that exact argument, in fact. Only one of them seemed to be joking.
(To be fair, and to head off
lengthy and likely fruitless discussion of my cognitive prowess and/or
attention to significant detail, I will note that few people were conversing
with any great enthusiasm at that juncture.
Most seemed to be settling in and getting tasting their food and drinks
while exchanging subdued signs with their companions.)
By the sheerest razor’s edge of
luck, a single table opened up just as I was walking through the room. I co-opted it with a grim focus that would
have led to me shoving intervening people off a cliff (assuming a cliff had
been present) in my haste to reach it.
After setting up my computer and paying for my order3 I
decided to check the flyers on the outside doors and windows on the off-chance
that they were advertising events other than prog-rock and prog-art. Sure enough, after glancing past a half-dozen
events that seemed a little befuddled in theory, if not entirely unclear in
practice, regarding exactly what sort of affair they were so earnestly
advertising, I found a flyer announcing a gathering for a local ASL group.4
And thus was order restored to
my world. More accurately, thus was a
condition of slightly less chaos restored to my world.
~***~
They -- that
eternal, ubiquitous, and almost always anonymous they of modern folklore and pith – say learning a new language
grows progressively more difficult as one ages.
Children and young teenagers absorb the knowledge in much the same way
as they absorb every other sort of knowledge before radiating it back into the
atmosphere once more, generally with added madcap hormonal hijinks. In my early twenties, in grad school, I
managed to learn one last language, Old English5, to add to my
passing knowledge of French, Latin, and the occasional Alcoholic
Gibberish. Since then, I’ve not only
learned no new ones, but I’ve all but forgotten Old English (though I could probably recollect the Anglo-Saxon runic
alphabet which I studied in ancillary fashion to actual Old English.) By the time I learned it, I was past the age
of truly internalizing them without occasional practice.
Perhaps
it was a matter of devotion. Keeping up
with my skills – reading the fragments of Anglo-Saxon texts still floating
around, or perusing ‘Beowulf’ in the original from time to time – never seemed
to be high on my priority list. Having
long since realized that the events of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court” were extremely unlikely to happen to me6, I had
little motivation to keep up with a dead language. At least Latin, which I could translate
passably well once upon a time, still has relevance to the Roman Catholic
Church, Vatican II notwithstanding.
In theory, learning sign
language should be straightforward enough.
Learn the gestures, the angles and arcs and subtle crooks of finger and
wrist. Attach them to words, transform
thought into action. We do this all the
time. We master the proper turn of a
steering wheel to get the desired effect.
We tap our feet to rhythm, or deftly move a full cup of hot coffee. We walk without falling flat on our
face. Most of the time. So, in theory, this is nothing more than an
extension of who we are as human beings.
We learn the proper motion to achieve the desired result.
Then again, in quantum theory,
we should be able to walk through walls.
In physics and eschatological theory, energy cannot neither be created
nor destroyed, so immortality is inevitable.
In linguistic theory, nothing really means anything except that which
our listeners allow it to mean. In
theory, people should be happy and healthy and content with their lives.
I’ve long since learned not to
trust theory any further than necessary.
In the end, theory makes liars
of us all.
If you're thinking that this is all bit of a high-falutin’
digression for a straightforward discussion of a learning experience, I absolutely agree. Roll your eyes to your heart’s
content. In the end, excessive ponderin’
and easy access to word processing programs that allows for the quick jotting
down of pointless cogitatin’ makes pompous twits of us all.
The point is, I hadn’t learned
sign language despite having a baby sister and a father who both learned it,
either for fun (sister) or for his job (father.)
So there I was in the midst of a
crowd beginning to sign with increased enthusiasm as the various sources of
caffeine. My particular table of
serendipity was located in a cozy little nook, my back to the wall and half my
view blocked by a counter. I settled in
to work,
Generally, I’m reasonably good
at blocking out stimuli. Being
hard-of-hearing helps enormously, but the flip side is that I don’t miss much
visually. (I take great pains not to react to things I see at the edges of my
vision, but I do see them better than most.)
So being able to ignore the visual stimuli as well is an
accomplishment. That night, however, I
became increasingly distracted by all the signing visible. Even when I stared closely at my screen, the
periphery was filled with constant motion.
Finally, I realized something odd – it was getting entirely too loud for
me to concentrate properly.
Is this ironic?
I want to say ‘Yes,’ but can’t
really fit it into any of the classic categories of irony7.
Having accepted my distraction
and bedevilment as inevitable, I surreptitiously watched a few conversations at
nearby tables. Strain as I might to
recognize some the signs, though, I found them incomprehensible. They were too fast, too skilled, too
completely unknown to me. Granted, that
last one pretty much sufficiently covered why I didn’t understand, but I had
some hopes of at least recognizing a few gestures even if the conversation was
several paragraphs past by the time I finally worked them out.
~***~
This wasn’t
completely idle hope. It wasn’t simply a
case of me believing I could understand just about anything if I tried hard
enough. I’d taken a preliminary ASL
class about a year prior, after encountering a group of deaf people at a sushi
restaurant and inquiring (via writing) as to where I could find a good sign
language class. They helped me by naming
some resources to check out. So, after
forking over $508 for a couple months, I spent two hours every
Tuesday evening learning the basics of sign language.
Note, I don’t say I learned it well.
This is an important plot point in my story here.
From memory, I can, with
relative assurance, say ‘thank you,’ ‘I love you,’ and ‘good morning.’ While these are all very helpful phrases when
engaged in sexual relations of various varieties, they don’t exactly cover a
wide range of conversational topics, and are almost completely useless in most
situations. Certainly I could walk back
up to the counter to thank the barista for making my coffee, for instance, but
I’m not entirely certain how a ‘good morning’ would come across, given that it
was 6:30 at night. And I rather suspect
a subsequent ‘I love you’ would make things incredibly awkward. While it’s possible she would leap across the
counter to embrace me with a mad passion and clinically insane fervor, I rather
suspect her reaction would be more accurately described as what the hell? and/or I’ve
called the cops and there are a dozen witnesses here if you try anything
untoward.9
I could also reliably sign the
letters ‘J’, ‘R’, ‘U’, and ‘W’. I can do
the ‘M’ and ‘N’ if you don’t nimd ne confusing one sigm for the other. If the fate of the world ever depends on a
hero who can reliably – if not quickly – fingerspell the word ‘wruj’ or
possibly ‘jurw’, I’m your man.
The class itself was, as noted,
an introductory one, filled with earnest people seeking to master the ancient
and noble art of gesture-talking. The teacher was capable and sincere. My classmates were attentive and seemed, to a
person, to have laudable intentions for learning. Some wanted to communicate with friends and
colleagues; others sought to better serve the public at whatever jobs they
held. As I recall, one had a deaf
relative, while another had goals toward working with the deaf.
Have you noticed what was
missing in my description of my classmates?
Go ahead and re-read. Think about the many possible motivations for
learning how to sign. Note that ‘have
nothing better to do with your hands’ isn’t one of them.10
If you still haven’t worked it
out, I’ll quit being coy, for coyness I have been accused of on occasion: out of the dozen or so students, not a single
one (myself excluded, of course) actually needed
to learn to sign, at least not for reasons of being able to function
independently in an aural world. All
seemed perfectly capable of hearing what was going on.
Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to
me that would be the case; in retrospect, though, it seems almost
embarrassingly obvious.
My situation, while certainly
not unique, is along a descending slope of the bell curve. As far as I can tell, the majority of deaf and
hard-of-hearing people are either older men and women, following a known and
accepted side-effect of aging, or have been deaf from a young age. Usually birth or infancy, it seems. Fewer start to lose their hearing in such
rapid fashion I’ve been doing in their early to middle adulthood.
Yes, that makes me special, a
unique and lovely snowflake. There
couldn’t be more than a few million in the same boat, right?
I’d order a cake to celebrate
but it’s not worth the hassle trying to interact with the baker.
Granted, my hearing was always a
bit suspect. Until a few short years
ago, though, I managed just fine. My
difficulties were more annoyances than serious impediments. Nobody was going to hire me to listen to
sonar aboard a submarine, but neither were they forced to mime every
conversation with me.
Since miming conversations with
me has grown increasingly necessary, I really have few options at this
juncture. So I immediately took the seat
directly to the teacher’s right at the beginning of the first class and held
fast to that position for the entire run of the course. Well, almost
directly. A young lady11 sat
between me and the teacher, a laptop in front of her. She would then spend the next two hours
typing out what the teacher was saying so I could follow the discussion.
It’s a bit surreal to be in a
sign language class designed for people who could hear the teacher, requiring ad hoc techniques for a person who
actually needed to learn.
The teacher and the assistant
and my classmates all to be lovely people who sincerely wanted to make things
easier for me. I have absolutely no
complaints at all. As I’ve discovered
lately, there’s always a certain element of pity. That’s unavoidable, and, in many ways, it
speaks well of our poor, benighted species.
However, that particular topic evokes a complex reaction in me, so it
will remain a discussion for another essay, one I’m sure I’ll tackle before too
long.12
In any case, the other people in
the room gave every impression of being quite honestly interested in just being
helpful. I just found it a bit ironic,
an intellectual quirked eyebrow, as it were, to discover that it was more
problematic for a hard-of-hearing person to follow the class than one with full
possession of their hearing.
If I could offer a more suitable
method of teaching a mixed group, I would.
But since all my ideas revolve around group texting, messaging
technology, and the occasional bout of metaphysical Twister, I have to admit
that they handled it as well as could be expected. There’s a reason deafness is considered a
handicap, after all – it handicaps communication. If an elegant and simple solution existed, it
wouldn’t be a handicap.13
The hard truth of the matter
was, I found learning sign language difficult.
For someone who has rarely experienced any particular difficulty
learning whatever happened to interest me at a given time, this turn of events
could be quite frustrating. While I
completely understood the necessity, and felt a certain amount of fascination
with the links between gestures and the words and ideas they represented, I
couldn’t muster up the intellectual energy to focus to the degree necessary to
master the topic. Despite the fact that
I paid for a class that wasn’t going
to affect anything like ‘grades’ and ‘graduation’, I had to focus on being
nervous about failing to learn the week’s assignments before the next class.
To avert accusations that this
particular lady (of a gentlemanly ilk) doth protest too much, I’m only going
to say this once: I’m not stupid. Not even remotely. Nevertheless, I struggled to pick up sign
language.
Part of this, I think, was the
atrophying of my study skills. For many
years now, since grad school, I’ve read and researched and studied a considerable
number of topics. My knowledge base has
continued to expand over the years, often in direct linear correlation with the
expansion of the Internet. I will
confidently claim to be better educated now than I was years ago, and I was
pretty damned well educated years ago.
But I study topics and subjects that I find fascinating for no other
reason than that they just happened to occur to me one day. I vacillate every which way across vast
regions of knowledge, every bit of datum for itself and the Devil take
hindmost.
So perhaps another part of the
reason I was slow to pick it up was that I chafed under the restriction of
necessity. Learning was a task, a work
of rote and goals and all that implies a lack of the freedom of exploration
that I value to a ridiculous degree. I
am, at heart, an autodidact.
The more I consider it, the more
this strikes me as an even more compelling reason than mere lack of
studiousness.
~***~
The
complicated conversation amongst the ASL speakers in the coffee house soon grew
too fast, too complex for me to separate individual words or isolate the
meaningful motions that marked the exchanges.
They appeared to be talking faster than I ever do verbally14. And yet there was an odd beauty in the
control demonstrated with each movement.
A fairly stout blonde boy, no older than 17 or 18 to my eye, moved thick
fingers with a delicacy that could thread needles. Fascinated, I watched him surreptitiously
until I could make out most words and the clauses they formed together. Though the fingerspelling was still far too
fast for me to follow, I could at least see their place in the flow of the
conversation, where they began and ended.
I even saw a word that I could guarantee began with ‘J’ because the
finger placement and motion are distinctive.
Obviously, I had no idea what it was actually about, but I could identify it as a language, as communication.
Across the table from him was a
cute girl. I attempted to watch her
instead since, given my druthers (and who doesn’t want to receive their
druthers from time to time?) a cute girl wins out when I’m engaged in
surreptitious voyeurism. And I realize
that term evokes some unsavory imagery, but what else can I really call it? I was watching them at angles, between
glances, careful not to let on what I was doing. Pretty much defines surreptitious
voyeurism.
The girl’s hands and fingers
moved as quickly and frequently as the boy’s, a perfect balance in the dialogue
between the two. But I couldn’t keep
from returning my observation to the boy.
The disproportionate thickness and stubbiness of his fingers accentuated
the skill and elegance of sign language being used with the same fluency as I
use spoken English. Possibly a bit more
fluency, given I tend to go off on pointless digressions and deliberately use
words in a manner not strictly in keeping with their lexicographical
underpinnings. One doesn’t expect that
sort of fluid motion with pudgy fingers and thick arms, yet there it was.
To call it artistic in same
manner one might praise a particularly skilled and mellifluous orator wouldn’t
have quite been a bridge too far.
Granted, some of the movements were abrupt and unwieldy, forcing out
their meaning, but so, too, is some art.
(Just so it’s clear, I mention
this particular speaker’s weight and physiognomy not as commentary concerning, or
disapprobation of, either aspects. I’m
merely trying to illustrate how language subsumes its medium to achieve a
certain grace in toto.)
My eyes scanned the rest of the
group, all deeply in conversation. Here
and there, someone seemed to be making an emphatic point, the signs becoming
more pronounced, more periodic. I
couldn’t tell if people were being convinced or not – discerning who was
talking to whom proved difficult. A
half-dozen conversations criss-crossed the table as everyone around seemed to
be looking at different people as the conversation progressed. What fascinated me was that the very fact
that I couldn’t understand what was being expressed with such skill meant they
could be saying the crudest, rudest things imaginable and I’d never know.15
Finally, I gave up. I hadn’t intended to watch them for quite so
long. My computer had shifted to
screensaver16 and my thoughts had started to return to what I was
writing. At the periphery, though, the
motion still caught my eye. A vague
sense of motion reminiscent of a flock of birds rising kept my eyes darting up
for a brief moment.
I started to shut down my
computer. As fascinating as the scene
was, I wasn’t there to people watch, and the distraction pretty much prevented me
from accomplishing anything meaningful.
I threaded my way out, careful not interfere with the movements around
me.
The next time I was there during
a meeting of this group, sitting in the exact same seat, I barely even noticed
them. Apparently, familiarity breeds
concentration.
Yes,
a bad pun. Deal with it.
~***~
This is how
language works: it savagely breaks down
the vast abstract of the human condition into brittle bits and pieces and crushes
them together into a brutal but lucidity.
At its core, language is imposition, forcing the vagaries of experience
into concrete symbols, if only for our own benefit. We channel instinct through idiom, thought
through synthesis, self through semiosis.17
It may only be the illusion of control, but it’s a very
powerful illusion.
We instinctively shy away from
such description of how humans interact.
The implied violence of the process offends our sensibilities. Can we call expressions of love savage? What of inspiring speeches? Are they mere strong-arm tactics? The harmony of lyrical poetry would seem
completely at odds with this analysis of the language paradigm.
I don’t disagree. And yet I maintain that this implied violence
does not contraindicate any of these things.
All expression is violent to one degree or another because all desire to
express ourself is an act of breaking free from our inherent isolation. A body at rest tends to stay at rest unless
acted upon by an outside force. It’s not
merely Newtonian; it’s philosophy, and biology.
Mere existence contraindicates interaction. What we are is not what we express. So when we speak, or write, or sign, or share
a meaningful gaze, we force mere existence into motion, into
communication. We learn to force commonality
to escape isolation.
Language, after all, is about
expressing the abstract in a manner others can understand. Even when we can’t understand the basics, we
recognize the attempt.
At its heart, language embraces
reciprocation, acts of encoding and code-breaking, exchanging concepts in ways
that allow others a brief understanding of what we’re thinking, what we’re
feeling. Every language has a pattern. That’s part of the way we learn new ones,
associating sounds with symbols, intonations with particular acts. Identifying even the most unfamiliar language
isn’t particularly difficult. That is
the heart of linguistics. A properly
educated human can single out a real language out of thousands of false ones simply
through pattern recognition.18
Generally, forgeries can be disproved in this manner. Not quickly, mind you, nor easily, but
pattern recognition ultimately works because language and expression are
inherently structured.
Any human interaction beyond the
tactile and instinctual requires this patterning. We modify and rehash and contort our
instruments of communication until, by some miracle of rare device, our
audience grasps some cogent fraction of what we’re trying to convey. A frisson
of truth, as it were. The infinite
fluid imprecision of thought and emotion forcibly bottled up in the phylacteries
off expression
And then it’s gone as though it
never intended to stay. We expect
more. We wear the anticipation about us
like a long-muted technicolor dreamcoat.
For all our attempts to set things in stone, they fade like mist under a
morning sun, and all the psychometrics in the world can only measure what we
have learned, not how we learned it.
I’m not waxing philosophic
without a point. We define ourselves
through language. Our self-image is
couched in adjectives and predicates and all the thousands of nouns that swirl
about us, each a name for some part of who we are. The self – anima/animus, to go Jungian rather
than Freudian – remains undefined in the social context until we take measures
to define it. In order to define it,
however, we need to create a continuum.
Not only do the appropriate words change, the words themselves take on
nuance and subtle shifts until what we once described as beautiful or tall or pellucid changes because the ideas we
encoded in the words beautiful or tall or pellucid have changed.
Language defines the times we
live in. As such, it defines our
world. So, as my hearing goes, my
ability to take control of my world fades as well. I should
learn sign language, even if it narrowly restricts the kinds of interactions I
can have. My difficulty is that I don’t
think like that, don’t understand the world like that. It’s not some simple substitution
cypher. I’m generally a very polite
person, for instance, but do I say thank
you in a voice that conveys that I am, in fact, thankful, or does the act
of touching fingertips to chin and gesturing outwards compass my intentions, my
sincerity?19
Seems silly, right?
It is. I acknowledge that. Hell, as a quasi-absurdist, I’ll even embrace
it. Mere silliness isn’t, in itself,
sufficient reason to dismiss something out of hand.
And it’s more than that. I cling to the spoken word, to the sensation
of lilting vowels and brutish consonants, the vibration in the air and the
gentle lips against my ear. In some
place, deep inside me, I admit that my resistance to learning sign language
isn’t mere inefficiency of study or lack of freedom. It’s something entirely slightly more
profound, and far more petty. Every happy memory I have with others –
friends and family and lovers and those I couldn’t quite categorize but
definitely weren’t any of the three aforementioned – comes down to each
concrete detail. Language isn’t an
idea. It’s an enactment, and every
nuance depends on how we choose to articulate our thought, make our desires as
real as the things we desire. When I
told people I loved them (or, in one memorable case, the person told me I was
in love with her and I concurred after a bit of thought20) , the
sensation, the sentiment, was carried
in words and voice. I could have just
hugged them or looked adoringly into their eyes or sent them a particularly
emotive stuffed bear, but the artifact of language can replace all of
these. When someone told me she loved
me, the memory of her voice far outstrips the odds and ends, the items that
represented the reality of our relationship.
Every moment is sensation. Every sensation becomes memory. Once I commit to learning sign language, I’m
finally acknowledging that the world as I used to experience will be merely
memory.
Even for someone like me, who
generally rejects maudlin nostalgia as completely pointless, it’s not quite so
easy to accept this as one might think.
As I left, I took one last glance at the
ASL group happily signing away, smiles crinkling their cheeks and eyes intent
on each other. In this stew of human
interaction, we struggle in our divergence, in our threading path along the
twisted interlocking branches of the tree of knowledge. Trial becomes error, error becomes learning,
learning becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes self-fulfilling
futility.
Yes, I am aware of how dark that
got, and how quickly it did so. My point
is, language will always be an ongoing process, not just the learning and
mastery of it, but what it comes to mean in the narrative of our lives. Even the mistakes.
Language doesn’t really evolve,
after all. We do, in the quotidian
process that we rarely quite notice when it’s happening.
The ASL group merely represents
a necessary evolution, both for deaf people in general and for me in
particular. For them, learning sign
language was born of the same necessity that learning spoken language was for
me, after all. The linguistic paradigm
they created for themselves was every bit as complex and old as the one I’d created
for myself. If I must embrace this new
paradigm for myself soon, and it seems increasingly certain that I must, I can
at least look to these people for evidence that it will work.
Eventually. Because I didn’t forget that I blamed my
study habits, and no realization in the world can fix chronic laziness.
~Fin~
Footnotes
1) To save you
the trouble of looking it up, SLAMBAMTHANKYOUMA’AM is absolutely a real
language, I swear, but hardly one approved by either practitioners of sign
language or, indeed, basic decency. It
has only a half-dozen words, all of which revolve around the need to be elsewhere
with unceremonious haste the next morning.
2) A specialized
subset of the ‘wondering what the holy hell is going on’ skill. While I’ve been known to misapply it to
situations that didn’t require anything more than a ‘wondering what the hell is
going on,’ I feel that sometimes a man has to shake things up by wondering what
in the blue blazes is happening just to stay in practice. Nothing worse than encountering a situation
requiring one to wonder what in the blue blazes is happening and all one can muster
is a feeble ‘holy hell’ sense of wonderment.
Aren’t you glad you read this entire footnote?
3) I suspect I
have become predictable, because I didn’t accidentally leave out ‘ordering’ in
my description of the tasks I undertook.
The baristas knew I would order a large Americano, two shots, in a mug
rather than a disposable cup. They had
almost finished making it by the time I arrived at the counter. They’re lovely people, it must be said
One of these days, I’m going to order a triple mocha non-fat butterfoam
latke latte with fresh-ground cinnamon and tansy, just to keep people on their toes.
Then again, given that the order is probably complete nonsense, I
suspect they’re more likely to stomp on my toes instead, just to remind me not
to be a twit.
4) Really, I can
be forgiven for not noticing before.
Indie and prog-rock groups, especially local and regional ones, tend to
have the most random names, so “ASL Group” could just as easily been some
latter-day postmodern shoegazer pop group that stood on stage silently waving
their hands at the audience for 45 minutes before traipsing off to take some
hallucinogens.
The group also apparently didn’t feel the need for the long-form
acronym, and I fully support their decision, especially since there’s no point
in doing a weird cross between the acronym and an abbreviation.
5) Yes, Old
English is essentially a foreign language.
So many people are surprised to learn that their nemesis in 10th
grade literature classes, Shakespeare himself, wrote entirely in Modern
English. It’s the exact same language we
speak now. Chaucer wrote in Middle
English and most people need annotations to understand him. Old English is to Modern English as, well,
German is to Modern English.
6) Nobody, or at
least nobody who didn’t want to be scorned and scoffed at, would describe me as
a Yankee at all, let alone a Connecticut one.
In order for the events of the story to come to pass for me, some
heavy-duty dialect training and lots of faked documents would be required. That just seems unlikely.
Also, time travel, I guess. But
the ‘transforming me into a Yankee’ part just seems harder to believe.
7) The classic
types of irony are verbal, situational, and dramatic. Even after years of studying and reading
literature, I still don’t know why it’s important to differentiate them. Irony is a pretty simple and straightforward
concept. The divide between expectation
and reality, generally with an unexpected or incongruous element. Though I’m not inclined to do so, I make
every effort to assume Alanis was being ironic about about the flawed examples
of irony in the song. A meta-commentary,
as it were.
8) As it turned
out, the $50 wasn’t actually necessary in my case. Apparently these classes were free for those
who needed them for reasons of actual deafness.
But I’d paid already, so nothing to do but forge ahead with the
knowledge that I had money at stake, which should have been a great
motivator. Unfortunately, I completely
overlooked the fact I care almost nothing about money. In general, $50 means
nothing to me except lots of coffee and maybe a good book of Hindustani
Madlibs. This general insouciance is
good for the soul – lack of greed and acquisitiveness has traditionally been a
metric of morality in most religious systems – but bad for the pocketbook and
the pocketbook’s usefulness in situations where coffee might be purchased. But good for the soul all the same. Even Christianity, the modern
politically-induced fervor for rapacious capitalism endemic amongst certain substantial
branches of Christian faith notwithstanding.
It’s not that I dislike capitalism – practically speaking, it’s
generally the most effective economic system – but I do have to raise an
eyebrow at people whose Lord and Savior preached poverty and humility being so
gung-ho for such things in the political arena.
But now I’m pontificating on politics, and that’s very much a discussion
for another time and place. Carry on,
brothers and sisters. Carry on.
9) Just to be
clear, most of the baristas at this particular coffee house give every
indication of being perfectly lovely, intelligent, and charming people who
would more than likely just smile politely and wait until I was out of view
before exchanging baffled glances and nervous laughs with their
co-workers. I don’t want to sully their
names, unknown though those names are to me, by suggesting they are prone to
overreaction.
10) Though, in a
perfect world, maybe it should be. The
world would be so much more civilized if people who had nothing better to do
did something better anyway. Though, on
that lengthy and frequently unsavory list of things one can do with one’s
hands, I can think of several equally enticing possibilities. But let’s not go down that particular rabbit
hole just yet. Perhaps I will
soliloquize (possibly even rhapsodize) some day when I have a few drinks in
me. Since, after a wild and wooly youth
drinking all manner of concoctions in all manner of places, I no longer drink
much, that occasion may be quite a while in the future.
11) I never really
learned what function she performed outside of the class, or what position she
held, whether an employee of the department or an assistant teacher or just
some stranger who happened to wander in with a laptop, a fizzy drink, and a
burning need to transcribe something.
Actually, there were two different young ladies. But one was there for the vast majority of
the classes.
12) Until I do
discuss the pity aspect of interactions with others, however, I feel the
need to make one thing clear regarding self-pity: I absolutely do not do it in any way, shape,
or form. It’s just not in my nature, and
never has been. Even if it were, I’d
absolutely refuse to engage in it. I’ve
had a pretty good time of it, and if a little suffering is a part of it, that’s
just how it goes. Life is too short, and
too fun, for me to wallow.
13) Not to be
tendentious (honestly), I refer to my condition as a ‘handicap’ without
reservation. The various
less-straightforward terminologies simply do not work for me. It’s a handicap. I’m not ‘handicapable,’ at least not in any
fashion that couldn’t be easily replicated by someone who doesn’t suffer from
hearing loss.
I want to make this clear, though:
I absolutely do not begrudge anyone for embracing alternative phrasings.
Everyone, handicapped and non-handicapped alike, is fighting for meaning in
this world, and if a person’s self-image is abetted by calling him or herself
‘handicapable,’ they have every right to embrace it.
14) The pedant
in me requires that I clarify:
technically, ‘orally.’ “Verbal”
simply relates to the creation of words, audible or not. Sign language is as verbal as spoken language. But ‘orally’ just seems…loaded, as millions
of easily-amused middle-schoolers have demonstrated over the years.
15) It was like a friend I had who could curse a storm
in French, and she would do so in the most mellifluous tone, taking pleasure in
the fact that her listeners couldn’t understand her. She even avoided merde because that one was
too well-known to English speakers. The
day she first encountered me – it was a group dinner at Outback – we became
good friends because I couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that she was
reciting French profanities and obscenities and telling everyone it was
Baudelaire. I called her on it as we
both went outside for a smoke and that was that.
Granted, it took me several seconds to realize she wasn’t reciting a
Baudelaire poem because old Chuck could be a pretty profane guy. He didn’t name his most famous collection Les
Fleurs du mal for nothing, with sections such as ‘Spleen et Idéal’, ‘Révolte’,
and ‘La Morte’ (I don’t imagine you need translations for any of these.) He was a rancid nihilistic old bastard. And a brilliant poet, because there’s no
reason why poetry can’t be rancid and nihilist.
16) "Obscurum per obscure" both because I’m a pretentious
twit and because "Nemo surdior est quam is qui non audiet" was just slightly too
long for the screensaver app to accept it.
The latter quote I’ve reused as an epigraph here. I’d put a footnote, but then I’d have to go
renumber all the subsequent footnotes and that’s just a headache. In case you’re wondering, and I hope you are
because what’s the point of inserting random phrases from a dead language if I
can’t be properly beneficent by translating, this means “No-one is more deaf
than a person who will not hear.”
Remarkably, inserting the phrase into Google’s English-to-Latin
dictionary gives the exact right result.
I’ve rarely seen these translation services manage to get more than a
couple words correct at a time.
17) I wrote out
an entire section discussing modern semiotics, then realized that, despite the
fact that I’m quite interested in semiotics, I was bored to death by what I
wrote. If that’s the case, I’m sure you
would be too, and I don’t want to contribute to you leaving this mortal coil
via fatal dullness.
18) A properly
programmed computer can do so as well, in far less time. It’s a far simpler matter than teaching a
computer chess.
There was really no need to point this out in a footnote. At this point, I’m just writing footnotes
because I’ve become addicted.
19) During the
ASL class, the teacher took a moment to explain that the deaf don’t really get
sarcasm. The logic was sound, if not
impeccable, assuming my conclusion was what she intended to imply, i.e. that
it’s hard to convey sarcasm with hand gestures, given that tone and pitch of
voice are both heavily contextual with sarcasm.
I have difficulty imagining giving up both sarcasm and sincerity.
20) Her name is *Terri and I will be writing about
her at some point. Technically, *Terri is
the only person who knows me that will likely be reading this, so…hey, *Terri!
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