Learn sign language.

June 22, 2001 1:47 PM

Learn sign language. Or, knowing you - just pretend it's porn.
posted by geronimo_rex (12 comments total)

That's damn funny. You rock.
posted by ColdChef at 2:55 PM on June 22, 2001

She baked my dog???
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:18 PM on June 22, 2001

oops. Sorry. Slow connection.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:18 PM on June 22, 2001

If you ever wanna see a great documentary (and you can find it), check out "Sound and Fury". The movie centers around two deaf parents who are agonizing over whether they should get cochlear implants for their daughter. One of the main arguments given by the father against the implants is that, if the daughter joins the hearing world, she will miss out on all these elements of the deaf community, like sign language.

Prior to seeing this film I had never really seen people use sign language to converse, and had always sort of thought of it as a "substitute language", i.e. what you use when you can't use a "real language". Boy howdie, this film sure changed that perception. A few moments watching the parents having arguments in sign language showed me that sign language is a hell of a lot more expressive than two people hollering at each other in English, or whatever. In fact it drove home the point that everyone uses sign language in conversation to some degree or another. (Air quotes, anyone?.)
posted by Shadowkeeper at 3:20 PM on June 22, 2001

Oliver Sacks's Seeing Voices is well worth reading if you're interested in, for example, the cognitive benefits one gains from learning a gestural language. (Apparently, the deaf often have much sharper spatial abstraction skills than the hearing, and Sacks posits that at least part of this comes from the nature of sign languages.) After reading this book, I decided that if I ever have children, they should probably learn at least some ASL even if they hear perfectly.
posted by kindall at 3:40 PM on June 22, 2001

Ma, I jus' met the girl I'm gonna marry!
posted by dong_resin at 3:41 PM on June 22, 2001

If I ever have a kid, I'm definitely going to see to it she learns at least one other spoken language and ASL. The cognitive benefits of doing so are so clear. Plus she'll be in a good position when the UN takes over the world.
posted by aaron at 4:33 PM on June 22, 2001

Well, I was going to post this to Metababy, but it looks like the riff raff have taken over the site and made it unusable. So, I'll just point to it here: "i love metababy" in ASL.
posted by jkottke at 5:13 PM on June 22, 2001

Gee, thanks for telling me about Metababy. The first link I look at uses the old "file://con/con/" trick to crash Windows. I had to look at it with Lynx using a shell account to figure out what the hell happened.
posted by RylandDotNet at 5:36 PM on June 22, 2001

Metababy has been broken for two months. Where you been? It's been broken since before Greg Knauss said his goodbyes at EOD.

Ameslan is the most beautiful language on the entire planet. It's like watching ballet dancers fighting. I love just watching deaf people argue. I have no idea what they're saying but the power of sign language is just very compelling. It should be required learning in the public school system. I wish I'd learned it in my youth, but nowadays I'm just an old dog.
posted by ZachsMind at 9:20 PM on June 22, 2001

Hmmm... Wonder why wrestling looks like the sign for pregnant. I think it's even better than the real sign.

And then of course, there's the other kind of porn...
posted by fooljay at 12:27 AM on June 23, 2001

I'm totally missing the porn references in this thread, except here, where it explains how a baby signs "milk".

I guess I'm just not perverted enough...
posted by aki at 4:15 AM on June 23, 2001