Misadventures in American Sign Language

I was looking through my ASL dictionary today and it got me thinking about some of my early experiences in trying to communicate via ASL. I took an ASL I class when I was a junior in high school (way back in 2002-2003) but my first experience using the language as the only mode of communication with somebody wasn't until the summer of 2008, more than five years later.

I had just started working at Camp Sertoma, and it turned out that eight or nine of the people I was working with were deaf, and after a few days of staff training I was really eager to be able to communicate with these people and get to know them. One day I was talking with the Desiree (who is deaf) and Maggie (who is a CODA, or a Child of a Deaf Adult, so essentially she's bilingual) and Maggie was forcing me to try and sign the conversation myself. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but CODA's are often treated as built-in translators and they aren't always in love with that fact.

Anyway, I was getting to know Desi when I tried to sign "I had ASL class five years ago" but instead I signed, literally "I had ASL class five fuck ago" Desiree immediately started laughing, and Maggie said "Dude, you just said five fuck ago." Needless to say I was embarassed.

Another good story happened several weeks later. I had been teaching an astronomy class, and I was heading back to the main building on camp for my hour off. On my way I crossed paths with my group of campers and my partner, Juju. I tried to sign to him "my hour off" but I was carrying something, and my signing was unclear. Juju saw what I signed and his eyes got all big, turns out he thought I had said to "fuck off." But fortunately Juju and I got along great as partners and he probably knew that I would never knowingly tell him off like that, so I corrected myself and no feelings were hurt.

I'm not sure why it is that a lot of my experiences with messing up my signing involve me signing the word "fuck." Maybe I just have a crude mind like that.

Sign of the day: Annoy (with video!)

I wanted to do another 'sign of the day' blog today, but certain events transpired that led me to run away from Raleigh for the day. In doing so I left my trusty ASL dictionary behind, so with no pictures I decided to put my fears of looking like a fool behind and used my iSight camera to record my sign for the day. I look like hell, I haven't shaved for a while and I'm currently doing laundry which means I'm at the end of my wardrobe.

Anyway, on to the show

Today's sign: Annoy


This is definitely one of my favorite signs. I like the signed version of the word more than the spoken one. Mostly because it feels more descriptive of the mood.

Side note: I thought before that the flat right hand landed in between the index and middle fingers, but I must have been wrong, because every description of the sign I can find has the flat right hand going between the thumb and index fingers. Perhaps some of my ASL-fluent friends can let me know which version is correct.

Sign of the day

You may not know this about me, but I like American Sign Language. It fascinates me, the culture intrigues me, and I think every American could benefit from learning about it, if not learning how to speaking some of the language themselves. Also, because I like to play with my scanner, I feel like scanning some from my ASL Dictionary and sharing. The word or phrase I choose will probably have something to do with my mood at the time, or something just plain random, we'll see.

Anyway, here's todays sign of the day.


Looking at the quality of the scan I'm thinking I need to find a better way to do this, one idea I have is that I could take a video of myself using the sign, but I'm very self-conscious about my signing ability, I'd hate to embarrass myself.

UPDATE: In my haste to finish up this post and get on the road I neglected to give proper attribution to my source. The dictionary entry is from The Random House Webster's American Sign Language Dictionary: Compact Edition by Elaine Costello.