My friend Jonobie shared this excellent NYT article over on Facebook by Amanda Morris, a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). This touches on something I have been experiencing--and MOSTLY enjoying--about re-engaging with my Deaf culture studies and studying ASL again.
I was in an interpreter program back in the 90's in Seattle. At that time in my school, social justice, gender identity, and even LGBTQ+ signs were not in common use enough to be taught as part of the program. So I never learned terms for concepts we use more commonly today, like "trans" or "gender identity", or even the phrase "social justice" itself! Emergent phrases like "Black Lives Matter" have been added and changed in just the last few years and are now common parlance, but still not universally settled upon. For instance, I learned from my Deaf black ASL instructor to use the term "cherish", while others use the term "important" in the same phrase. And there may be different signs for concepts based on if you are a member of that culture or not. The sign for "Black" in this same phrase has a variant which may be used by POC, but is not appropriate for white people to use--like using "the n word" is okay for those of the culture and definitely NOT if you aren't. ASL has similar rules.
I took a short class last summer which was taught by a Deaf Queer drag queen, and there was a lot of emphasis on these newer signs and increasingly common-use concepts. My instructor before that, at the beginning of the pandemic, was a queer black woman, and she, too, gave us a lot of social justice vocabulary. These were concepts that were important for all of us to learn quickly, given the George Floyd demonstrations were going on all over the globe and the landscape of language was shifting before our eyes as history was being made.
This article touches on the sign for phone right from the jump, which is familiar to me. My signs for phone, computer, video, and more were all outdated. My sign for dog was already a hybridization of the old and the new sign, so now I can just drop the awkward first half (patting the thigh), which doesn't read on camera. And some common concepts don't even have agreed-upon signs yet. For instance, some people spell out "Netflix", while some regional signs have popped up. No single one of these has been widely adopted enough yet to settle into the lexicon. Somewhat related to this, I recently learned that the Art Director at Amazon, Michael Nesmith, is Deaf--a fact I discovered when I went to look up if a sign had been codified for Amazon. He made a video showing how they sign it internally. (He also has a TED Talk on the importance of Universal Design, HERE).
My teachers have been great about imparting this information, often showing the old and new sign side by side and helping explain why the change, if it wasn't obvious. And there are still localized variants, where from teacher to teacher I learned different signs because of where they first learned ASL, or what their immediate community have adopted. Thanks to the ubiquity of online remote learning, in the past two years I have taken classes with teachers in Michigan, Rhode Island, and once even from Mexico. Their vocabulary and teaching approaches have all been unique, and I have found incredible value in this diversity of experiences to draw from.
All that is a longform way of saying that while it is challenging at times, I am for the most part enjoying seeing my own time-capsule understanding of ASL now evolving 25 years later. It can be challenging to change something ingrained for so long, but I can't help but be excited by seeing how language changes and adapts to the communities it serves.
Bonus link: A NYT article, also by Amanda Morris, about origins and meaning of ASL name signs.
I took a short class last summer which was taught by a Deaf Queer drag queen, and there was a lot of emphasis on these newer signs and increasingly common-use concepts. My instructor before that, at the beginning of the pandemic, was a queer black woman, and she, too, gave us a lot of social justice vocabulary. These were concepts that were important for all of us to learn quickly, given the George Floyd demonstrations were going on all over the globe and the landscape of language was shifting before our eyes as history was being made.
This article touches on the sign for phone right from the jump, which is familiar to me. My signs for phone, computer, video, and more were all outdated. My sign for dog was already a hybridization of the old and the new sign, so now I can just drop the awkward first half (patting the thigh), which doesn't read on camera. And some common concepts don't even have agreed-upon signs yet. For instance, some people spell out "Netflix", while some regional signs have popped up. No single one of these has been widely adopted enough yet to settle into the lexicon. Somewhat related to this, I recently learned that the Art Director at Amazon, Michael Nesmith, is Deaf--a fact I discovered when I went to look up if a sign had been codified for Amazon. He made a video showing how they sign it internally. (He also has a TED Talk on the importance of Universal Design, HERE).
My teachers have been great about imparting this information, often showing the old and new sign side by side and helping explain why the change, if it wasn't obvious. And there are still localized variants, where from teacher to teacher I learned different signs because of where they first learned ASL, or what their immediate community have adopted. Thanks to the ubiquity of online remote learning, in the past two years I have taken classes with teachers in Michigan, Rhode Island, and once even from Mexico. Their vocabulary and teaching approaches have all been unique, and I have found incredible value in this diversity of experiences to draw from.
All that is a longform way of saying that while it is challenging at times, I am for the most part enjoying seeing my own time-capsule understanding of ASL now evolving 25 years later. It can be challenging to change something ingrained for so long, but I can't help but be excited by seeing how language changes and adapts to the communities it serves.
Bonus link: A NYT article, also by Amanda Morris, about origins and meaning of ASL name signs.
