I
don’t exactly know how it came about that this is
the only sign they have absorbed. For about five years, I
have signed around the house whenever I have had a deaf
friend with me. They can’t retain or recognize the
sign for TEA or POP,
the sign for DINNER, or BATHROOM, and heaven knows they would be blown
away with a sentence, even in Signed Exact English.The
reasons vary. Mother finds the alphabet too hard to form
on her arthritic hands and is paralysed by the idea of
having to remember all the signs. Father is fascinated by
the theory of sign language, positing a similarity to the
ideographic written languages of China. My brother
“will probably take a course, eventually” and
my sister, … Well, there’s a million excuses,
isn’t there? Basically, they have never been put to
a real test, because I have been taking up the slack,
lipreading, letting events just happen around me, and
bringing my own signing companion to family events so
that at least I can amuse myself.I do
myself a bit of a disservice, I think. Invariably, I am
introduced to their friends and acquaintances with
“Kathryn is deaf, but if you look right at her, she
can lipread you.” This is a vast improvement over
“Kathryn has a hearing problem,“ the
introduction of my youth, and is preferable to leaving
the explanation of my inevitable non-comprehension to me.
But it is false advertising.I
cannot always lipread them if they look right at me. They
have walrus moustaches, buck teeth, thick accents,
cigarettes and gum. They fidget with their hands over
their mouths, and grin at me, as if a grin shows suitable
sympathy for the pathetic lot of deaf people, or they nod
as they talk, as if to cue me to the response they
expect. Give up. I couldn’t lipread them if they
were mouthing the answer to the $64,000 question. Nothing
I say or do gets this across to the family, even when
they end up repeating stuff for me. I should be proud
that the people who have known me so long seem to think I
have superhuman powers.Frustrated
as I am with this situation, nothing I have done over the
past five years of signing or decades of hit-and-miss
lipreading has penetrated this perception that I can
understand anything I put my mind to. Lacking any other
strategies, I have just been sitting quietly back, and to
my amazement, an interesting phenomenon is unfolding. My
sister has a 2½ year old daughter, the first of
Woodcock, The Next Generation. What has transpired is
evolution at its best. Where her elders had failed, this
little genius has managed to learn food signs, animal
names, family relationship words, and assorted other
signs. Up till now, it’s mostly been just naming
things with their signs, but just last week, as she was
shovelling popcorn into her little mouth by the little
fistful, I signed to her with a conspiratorial smile,
“you piggy.” Her eyes lit up as comprehension
dawned: You can make sentences with these things!
Quickly she signed back “no, you piggy!!” Now
she’s picking up the concept of the
two-fingers-as-legs classifier. It’s like a bike
down a hill now. Now my sister knows most of the signs my
niece knows, because they watch the Sign Me a Story
video together. My niece shows her daddy and Nanny and
Grandpa and they’re soaking them up too. What I
couldn’t do, my niece is doing for me— teaching
my family signs. Give it another ten years…This article previously appeared
with my permission in
ALDA News (1993)
ALDA: Association of Late-Deafened Adults
www.alda.org
