Thursday, June 7, 2018

Learning sign language







The only thing I can say in sign language is "Thank you". I used to know a couple of other things, but I've forgotten them. It turns out "You're welcome." would actually be the more useful thing to know in my line of work. In my line of work people are generally thanking me and I'm telling them I would have done it anyway because it is all so fun.

So every once in awhile I deal with a deaf person or two at the front desk of my library and, because of my limitations, it always comes down to notes on scraps of paper. Lots of notes. As you may gather from this blog, I am loquacious.

I am also slow at handwriting.

I don't help a lot of deaf people, but when I do it can go on for hours.

Today I saw two deaf men talking animatedly up in the fiction area of my library. I realized there that, even if I am unlikely to ever learn much in the way of American Sign Language there is one sentence I would desperately love to master:

I would quite like to have been able to go up to those two men and interrupt them. "This is a library" I would flawlessly sign, "I'm going to have to ask you guys to keep it down."







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