Archives for June 2004

This originally appeared in The Tactile Mind Weekly in Trudy’s ON HAND column.

When I go out with a signing hearing person, I’m often unsure of protocol for ordering. With deaf people, it’s a given that we’ll order for ourselves. With hearing people, I prefer to order for myself–but what if the situation becomes silly and it’s easier to just let the hearing person speak for me? Is that showing I’m not independent enough and “need help”?

A few months ago, I went to a dinner with a hearing friend I hadn’t seen in seven years. When the waiter came around, my friend knew I was going to order a Sprite and spoke for me before I could stop him. I told him that I’d prefer to order for myself, and he was cool about it. But the waiter kept on talking to him, even though I had pointed out my order and had indicated I wanted to write some of the particulars (ketchup, mayo, etc.). Worse yet, the waiter was almost impossible to lipread. I was annoyed, but my friend was an innocent bystander–or was he? Should he have told the waiter, “Please communicate with Trudy directly”? Should I have made a big deal out of it or just let it slide? Where is the fine line between asserting and overreacting?

What about if I’m with a fluent hearing signer? I was at Chipotle’s (a Mexican restaurant with a set-up much like Subway’s), and started to point to a menu–only to find that the order-taker was too short to lean over the counter to see what I was pointing to. So I hurriedly turned to my friend (an interpreter) and asked her to order for me. I felt bad for “depending” on her, especially since she was off duty.

Should I swallow my pride and not worry so much about whether I’m coming across as an idiot to the order-takers, and let the hearing person speak for me for the sake of convenience? Or do I offend the interpreter by “relying” on him/her like many other deaf people do?

Another time, I was at Wendy’s with a CODA. He was new to Deaf culture (although he grew up in it, he didn’t really know about the culture), and I let him order first in order to avoid having him speak for me. As he stepped aside to wait for his food, I wrote my order down. The teenage worker looked at me and spoke. The CODA stepped in to try and interpret, and I signed, “Myself, thanks”–and asked the worker to write. The worker spoke again, and I again gestured for him to write. He suddenly looked behind me, and I knew immediately that the CODA had spoken behind my back. I turned around and said, “MYSELF!” Finally the worker slowly wrote: “Circle one: Single or Junior?”

Should I have just let the CODA take care of it for me? Would the worker have spoken or written, “Circle one” to any other adult? My friend and I apologized to each other later–me for snapping at him, and him for not realizing I wasn’t like his uneducated parents who always relied upon him. He explained later that whenever he went out with his parents and their friends–oftentimes six or seven people–they expected him to interpret for all of them.

So what’s the answer to how protocol should be?

I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

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This aoriginally appeared in The Tactile Mind Weekly in Trudy’s ON HAND column.

So what’s the deal with the name contest for Sorenson VRS?

When I saw the announcements, I thought, “Not again!” In my original article about Holly Daniel, the hearing woman who faked being deaf for years and landed a Saturn car commercial where she invented a sign for the brand, I wrote:

Edna Johnston, an educator at Chicago’s Columbia College in the B.A. in Interpreting program and local ASL expert, explains, “The sign she invented . . . does not adhere to the rules set in ASL for the creation of new signs and ASL vocabulary–We have a limited number of signs for various makes of vehicles . . . basically we do not have initialized signs with descriptive motions (i.e. ‘B’ for Buddy and motion made for ‘music,’ ‘L’ for Laura and ‘tall,’ etc.). It’s not done that way.”

Johnston continues, “Another thing–when signs are created–they are usually iconic in nature and not initialized–for instance, microwave, fax, camcorder, etc. Actually right now, the deaf community fingerspells ‘Saturn’.” (Edited for brevity. DeafNation Newspaper, March 1997).

Sure, deaf and hearing people invent signs all the time, such as in the classrooms or workplace–but these signs are supposed to stay in these locations, not to be used publicly. Besides, it’s not really ethical to invent a sign specifically for the purpose of publicity, like the Sorenson name contest. At a conference I went to several years ago, an announcement was made onstage that the new sign for “Verizon” was a V slashed through the air downwards. People talked about it at the conference, but the novelty soon wore off and they started fingerspelling the name again.

When I saw the new sign for Sorenson VRS–shaking the “s” in the air, then fingerspelling VRS–I thought, “But that’s what some people have been signing all along? You had to hold a contest for that?” (The mocking signs like “Sore-VRS” hold no validity for me.) Seeing that Sorenson is a hearing-run company, it makes me even more confounded that they think they can create a new sign. It doesn’t matter if the person who submitted the winning entry is deaf or not.

When you put a group of deaf people together, signs will evolve naturally. The deaf kids at my high school and I had many of our own signs that had no direct English translations. These signs were used among ourselves, away from the influence of hearing teachers/interpreters.

I think we need to stop accepting that it’s okay for hearing companies, hearing people, or even deaf people to invent signs, and start allowing our beautiful ASL to evolve naturally.

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