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From: Stephen.White@p1.f853.n681.z3.fidonet.org (Stephen White)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Sign language  Part 1
Message-ID: <15214@bunker.UUCP>
Date: 26 Oct 90 03:59:13 GMT
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Index Number: 11336

 CS> My but you do have a way with words! First off my reaction was to
 CS> laugh, but underneath it all is a bit of  sadness.

Words are a much more efficient weapon than violence. I wonder if
the repeat offenders in jail would benefit from being taught verbal
annilihation techniques? At the moment, they're expected to be a
neutered member of society when they come out.

 CS> It sounds to me as if deaf Aussies have the same troubles we deaf
 CS> United  States folk have.. and I suspect, Deaf Canadians as well.

Oh, the human race as a whole is immature. Hence the universality
of discrimination within the human spectrum.

 CS> after all this is a person's  life those so called
 CS> professionals are dealing with. The question is how do we handle
 CS> them ?

Hmm, I've a couple of nice ideas, but the problem is how do we get
rid of remnants? I'm not sure that garbage disposal companies take
liquified meat...

 CS> Debate. There are those dummies on the one side who push some
 CS> stupid  method called oralism.You know.. the kind where the
 CS> teacher stands in  front of you and makes you repeate  again and
 CS> again a..no, not e.. a,

Ahh, I'm a product of the oralism school. Fortunately, I've rubbed
out the "Made in Hong Kong" label.

"These people are guaranteed for the span of their useful working life."

 CS> but how to porperly say the  letter a.! Very very educational let
 CS> me tell you!

A text file I had...

 > Tyranny of Oralists against signers.
 > 
 > By Laurent Clerc.
 > On an oralist trying to teach him to speak.
 > 
 >    Nothing was more important to the emergence of that self-knowledge
 > than my first act of defiance, for how is a boy to learn who he
 > really is without discarding who he is not? Significantly, the issue
 > was speech. Epee, and Sicard had the wisdom to see that the deaf as a
 > class could never be educated orally, but still they pandered to the
 > public enchantment with talking deaf-mutes. Thus sometimes, instead
 > of recreation afer supper, I and a few other promising pupils were
 > assigned to the abbe Margaron for articulation lessons. We learned to
 > articulate pretty well all the letters of the alphabet and many words
 > of one or two syllables. But I had great difficulty with the
 > distinction between da and ta, de and te, do and to, and so on. The
 > abbe would pull his chair up to my stool so close that our knees were
 > touching and I could see the fine network of veins on his bulbous
 > red-blue nose. He held my left hand firmly to his voice box and my
 > right hand on my own throat, and glowered down at me through beady,
 > rheumy eyes. Then his warm garlic-laden breath would wash over my
 > head and fill my nostrils to suffocating.
 >    "Daaa," he wailed, exposing the wet pink cavern of his mouth, his
 > tounge obscenely writhing on its floor, barely contained by the
 > picket fence of little brown-and-yellow teeth.
 >    "Taaa," he exploded, and the glistening pendant of tissue in the
 > back of his mouth flicked towards the roof, opening the floodgates to
 > the miasma that rose from the roiling contents of his stomach below.
 >    "Taaa, daaa, teee, deee," he made me screech again and again, but
 > contort my face as I would, fighting back the tears, search as I
 > would desperately, in a panic, for the place in my mouth accurately
 > to put my tounge, convulse as I would my breathing - I succeeded no
 > better.
 > 
 >    I turned my back on them and walked away, towards my new family. I
 > have never spoken again.

Fortunately my teachers used breath fresheners, but the process
was similar.

 CS> this is the group that would prefer  to have a world in which all
 CS> deaf folk are on one side of the spectrum  and hearing folk on the
 CS> other side and woe to those who    would dare to  cross over.

                _____/\_____
               /            \
              /  /---\/---\  \          HAVE A SEAT!
              \ \          / /
               \ \        / /
                \|_      _|/        Now you too can join the
                    _____
                   |     |              DEAF COMMUNITY!
                   |     |
                   / -- /|
                  /____/ |
                  |    |
                  |    |                          (Acme productions)

Ooerr, perhaps I went a little overboard there! :-)

 CS> Sorry for the long monolgue..

Kettles don't have to apologise to the pot!

 CS> with  being bombarded with " you are deaf.. why the **** are you
 CS> talking with those hearing folk for ? Or.. "why Chris, how
 CS> wonderful of  you to  be able to talk to those poor deaf people..
 CS> how  did you learn  sign language so well?   Chris replies" I am
 CS> deaf myself" Oh, but you  talk so well...why bother learning sign
 CS> language at all?"

Same here. As you've probably read, in another one of my tomes
posted here, I keep getting thought of as hearing by people I've
known for years.

I'm learning to play the guitar, and when people query me about it,
I say "I'm not fucking stone deaf you know! I'm only pumice stone
deaf!"

--
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