Six semesters of ASL, three semesters of Deaf Studies, and a summer visiting three d/Deaf schools in Jamaica... guys I had to write a few pretty lengthy papers to pass those courses, but I loved that department so much and now I kinda wanna email my dean. (Not that Dean)

Reading fics where the author brings in Eileen is either incredibly enriching or annoying as all hell because—that’s just NOT how she would verbalize something, and DEFINITELY NOT how a d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing person would communicate A, B, and/or C.

Everything her character says? I’m putting my phone down and translating into sign. ASL sentence structure is not “English on the hands” it’s more, essentially:

I GO STORE? YES, STORE TIME 10 I LEAVE. TOGETHER? COOL! YOU GO, CHANGE, FINISH. WHEN READY? HERE I WAIT.

^^^ literally what most of my homework looked like for my first 3 semesters

We see Eileen use Simultaneous Communication (SimCom) in a few scenes, ex: “I’ll make popcorn!” [I MAKE POPCORN] and it points out the natural structure and pacing of ASL, especially when having to run two languages in your mind at once for the sake of the hearing people in the room.

Not so fun fact: the most recent statistics I could find show the vast majority of the d/Deaf community only reach an English literacy level of the average 3rd-4th grader. Remember reading as a 4th grader? Not even in middle school? This literally has nothing to do with IQ or general intelligence, this is a communication barrier between those who speak and those who can’t hear what is being spoken. It’s all about access to language within the right developmental time frame for your brain to absorb a “heart language”/native tongue. Communication of any kind is literally an unspoken, innate need from the moment you’re born.

But,

You can’t exactly “sound it out” with phonetics when you have little-to-no concept of SOUND itself. Imagine you don’t read, you just have sequences of letters like “t a b l e” memorized as what you’ve been informed by trusted sources is “table”. You’ve had people in your face, holding and maneuvering your throat and mouth in the proper way to make sure you know how to pronounce “table”, because you can’t hear the words, you can only feel the vibrations in their distinct locations as you mentally map out the structure of your vocal chords, throat, tongue, lips, etc.

You will start to hate the word table.

Watching a frustrated kid in speech therapy will bring you to tears. It’s dehumanizing and it’s only a second-hand feeling by comparison.

There are various factors that go into an individual’s level and consistency with English use, so this statistic has variables. We know Lillian O’Grady was taking care of Eileen and educating her during a time when Sign Language use was still inconsistent, taboo, and frowned upon by most of the hearing community. I understand technically it’s Irish Sign Language, but the basis is French to Old English before colonization (quote me on everything besides that, I might be wrong) so there’s some extreme overlap there. Based on her age, she 100% was growing up during the forced-audibility, smack-children’s-hands-with-a-ruler-for-“distracting other kids with all that hand-waving” time a few decades back. Not to mention she obviously went through speech therapy at some point considering she was rendered deaf before learning English. I just feel like her being an orphan and simultaneously highly educated given her circumstances is both cool and kinda under-fleshed-out on screen. We’re still progressing d/Deaf representation in media.

I encourage anyone and everyone to learn basic ASL. It’s super fun and surprisingly useful if you already talk with your hands.

Also watch CODA (Child Of a Deaf Adult), it’ll make you cry in the best ways.

— edit

Can’t stop coming back and updating this whenever I remember something else.

“Quick rant during a lunch break” my ahh

Anyway in case you can’t tell I’m passionate about certain things and this may be one of them.

Let me clarify my odd question. I write marvel fanfiction and original stuff at the moment. In order to understand and write Clint Barton, and other deaf characters in the future, better I've taken my interest in ASL off the back burner and decided to more seriously pursue it. Got a couple textbooks for my bday. Found Vicar's ASLU resources online along with some other promising resources I want to look in to.

Am I taking it too far by considering a degree in ASL/Deaf studies? I mean it's all for you Hawkeye but college is so expensive and I'm still finishing my first BA.. I gotta say some colleges look promising though. Liking some of the coursework options at one I found up in Boston.

Sharing interesting information for those looking for Deaf studies and educational peer reviews.

I’m only taking 8 units this semester but I’m feeling good about them. One is about refining your English skills when interpreting, which I’m really curious about. I thumbed through the textbook and it’s lots of listening and recalling the audio tracks included along with critical thinking about what’s being said.

This process, known as ‘auditory closure’, is the ability to use contextual clues to work out pieces of an auditory signal that are missing. I have had a lifetime of practice in decoding the things that I don’t hear. If I only hear part of a sentence, for example, I reach quickly for words and fit and discard them until the phrase makes sense. I’m not unique in using this technique. Donna McDonald, author of The Art of Being Deaf, describes lipreading as ‘an art rather than a science’ (19). She further elaborates, ‘I don’t actually see or read every single syllable enunciated to me. I spend much energy guessing what is being said by filling in any missing information by drawing on the circumstances of the conversation’ (19). This practice becomes so familiar that partly-deaf people extrapolate it to situations in which we can’t hear at all.

[...] Reading a poem demands a similar process of interpretation. A poem is bound together by images, sound and rhythm, which the reader or listener decodes: "Learning to read poetry is … learning the functions of each word within its specific placement in the poem: why each particular word is put in each particular position. Why that word? What is it doing there? How does it fit into the poem, and into what the poem is doing?" (Wolosky 3) 

The brevity of a poem forces a reader to think about the language they have been given, and this process of interpretation creates the poem’s meaning. Likewise a deaf person asks themselves, ‘What word have they used? What are they trying to say with that word?’ The spaces between unheard words are supplied by a deaf person’s imagination to create meaning, just as a person reading a poem fills in the blank spaces. For deaf people, the world becomes rich with meaning when we read what is around us, and fill in the spaces that we don’t hear.