Hope&Fears - As language evolves, the powers that regulate language tend to shift. Just look at the Oxford English Dictionary, who added terms like “duck face,” “lolcat,” and “hawt” to their prestigious lexicon this past December. For the English-speaking world, these additions are anywhere from ridiculous to annoying but at the end of the day, the terms are accepted and agreed upon.
But how do these new, internet-laden turns of phrase enter the sign language community? Was there a way of expressing “selfie” in ASL, was there a sign for “photobomb?” Our simplistic question turned into a larger conversation about the nature of communication.
We turned to Bill Vicars, the president and owner of an organization called Lifeprint, a company who educates through “technology-enhanced delivery of ASL Instruction, excursion-based instruction (trips to amusement parks), and extended-immersion-based program coordination (intense two-week residencies).”
Vicars himself is Deaf/HH, which means he is hard of hearing and culturally Deaf as he has immersed himself in the Deaf community. “In addition to my co workers, the majority of my friends are Deaf… my wife is Deaf,” Vicars explains. (Capitalizing ‘Deaf’ refers to the Deaf community, as noted by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, in Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (1988), “We use the lowercase deaf when referring to the audiological condition of not hearing, and the uppercase Deaf when referring to a particular group of deaf people who share a language - American Sign Language (ASL) - and a culture.”)
Vicars' website also offers a dictionary of ASL signs. The dictionary has been an ongoing project for Vicars since he started his organization and his means of including words is a multi-tiered process... Read more with photobombs: http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/internet/internet-american-sign-language
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