Don't @ me

The invention of the Sign Language Glove is some sort of periodic dudebro phenomenon that occurs spontaneously every year or two, like cicada broods or Old Faithful. Inventors and tech writers are helpless, like moths slamming their empty little heads into lightbulbs, as they breathlessly explain that now, at long last, Deaf people will finally be able to communicate with hearing people without resorting to interpreters, gestures, ASL classes, phones, or pen & paper. 

This is a pair of gloves that could translate sign language into speech or text. pic.twitter.com/eCaHOzzkkY

— Physics & Astronomy Zone (@ZonePhysics) May 31, 2019

All we'll need is this expensive and unwieldy device that can provide slow, limited, inaccurate one-way conversion of signs to text or speech- because the overriding problem for Deaf people trying to communicate with hearing people is DEFINITELY that the hearing people can't understand us, not the other way around.

Seeing things

One of the symptoms of my ridiculous neurological disorder is that during severe episodes, I sometimes hallucinate. Not like being high or on mushrooms hallucinating- I’m fully conscious and sober and aware of what’s going on. So the first time was terrifying but eventually I got used to it and now, for the most part, it is a manageable (if weird) symptom.*

I used to think about hallucinations a lot. Somebody would get arrested and be in the news and it would turn out they had hallucinated something or other, or it would show up in the plot of House, or whatever. I thought about it because I didn’t understand why it would be a colorable excuse for whatever thing they’d done. I imagined hallucinations to be some sort of wavy, semi-transparent projections, basically like the Leia message to Obi-Wan. I imagined "hearing voices" to be like hearing a voice sort of in the back of your consciousness, narrating or coming up with ideas or singing an annoying song, as we do. Surely one could just think critically about the situation, realize this was not real, and carry on accordingly.

Then I started having actual hallucinations. They are not like that. They look and sound** and feel exactly like real things. I cannot tell the difference between a hallucination and reality (unless the hallucination is a glowing orb floating through the air or something else actually impossible). Most of the time, I see people standing around or walking, or hear a dog barking, or feel someone tapping my shoulder. Things that could, and do, happen in reality. So even though I know I’m hallucinating, I don’t know which parts of the world are hallucinations and which parts are real. I have to get a second opinion if I hear a loud crash. When I repeatedly felt kittens running all over me, jumping up on the bed and then leaving, I had to ask J if they had recently adopted a bunch of kittens or were fostering or cat-sitting or something. (They hadn't and weren’t.)

One time, I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a person standing in my doorway. It was dark, so I couldn’t see the face, and I had no idea if it was someone I knew checking on me for some reason, or a dangerous intruder who had broken into the house, or a hallucination. I froze, and could not figure out a response that would be appropriate for all three scenarios. In the end I threw a tennis ball, to see if it would bounce off the person, hoping that a friendly person would forgive me and that an intruder would not be affected in any consequential way. (It did not bounce off the person, who was a hallucination after all, but did bounce down the hallway, which the housemates found unsettling.)

So, for the most part I don’t hallucinate impossible things that are easy to identify as hallucinations. I see and feel and hear things that might actually be happening. I’m aware that I’m hallucinating, but I have no idea what’s real and what’s not. That is a bizarre and scary and sometimes embarrassing position to be in. I generally just go to bed and hide/sleep until I’m over it, because trying to interact with the world is overwhelming and exhausting.

I start out from an extremely privileged position. I grew up in a stable, safe environment. I did not experience any traumatic events as a child. I did a ton of therapy and got to a high level of self-awareness. And most importantly, I know the hallucinations will stop. My episodes of illness last a few days, and the hallucinations typically only last 8-10 hours. If I wait it out, it will be over, and I will be back in reality for the next while. I have the option of hiding/sleeping until it is over.

If those things weren’t true, I would absolutely be a person who[m] society would deem Crazy and Dangerous. There is no way I would be able to maintain any sort of objectivity long-term; I would abandon the attempt to distinguish between hallucinations and actuality, and I would give up on the idea of interacting with people in a socially acceptable way. I would make everyone very uncomfortable. I would end up in prison, or a hospital, or homeless, or dead.

I think another key aspect of my privileged position, in this context, is that I’m deaf. (Woo! Deaf Gain!) If I hear understandable voices, I know they’re not real. If I hear something that sounds like what I can hear, I can take my hearing aids out to check. But even when I am absolutely sure that they are not real, the sounds are incredibly disruptive and unpleasant. It’s hard to think about other things. If I were hearing, it would be impossible to know which sounds were real, and there’s no way to throw a tennis ball at them to find out. If the voices never stopped (if I didn't know I'd get a respite after a few hours), I would eventually start interacting with them and following directions and believing, despite "knowing" otherwise, that they were real. I would lose track of which people I could admit to seeing/hearing and which people were secret, and I would never be certain that other people could see or hear what I did. I could easily become convinced that there was some sort of implant in my head or that I had some psychic connection to aliens or was receiving prophecies or something, anything, to explain my experience. Humans make up stories to explain all the time; it’s what we do. Admitting to being a “crazy” person is something we fight against, hard. Society doesn’t help; we live in a world that is extremely hostile to disability. The hallucinations feel very real. An extremely improbable conspiracy theory is much easier to believe in than that your brain, your mind, is betraying you to such an elaborate, realistic, extent.

Anyway. This all has given me a very different perspective on people who experience hallucinations and sometimes manage them in socially unacceptable ways. Obviously I do not know what it’s like to have any specific mental illness, or to have been trying to manage it for years and years. My perspective, and my brain’s neural pathways, are built on very different backgrounds. But I have more insight, and a lot more empathy, than I did previously.

I still think about hallucinations a lot, but instead of wondering what they are like, I try to come up with replicable systems for dealing with them. (Other than keeping a bag of tennis balls on hand all the time.) I have some strategies for myself, but I’m not the typical experiencer. It would make things so much more pleasant and less frightening if there were a viable, systematic strategy for managing the situation. (I am aware that psychology and psychiatry have been working on this since they were invented, but I’m not talking about medicine, or something to make the hallucinations go away. I’m talking about something to use to deal with the hallucinations when they are there, while remaining safe and calm.)

I haven’t come up with much, yet. But at least (I think) I know more details about what the problem is, now.

Brains are very mysterious.



*it’s not my weirdest symptom. A day or two before major episodes begin, water starts to taste sweet to me. It tastes like I’m drinking sugar water. No doctor has done anything but raise their eyebrows at me when I tell them this, so I assume it’s not a signifier of some catastrophic neurological event. It is useful, on the one hand, because it gives me some warning. I can do a bunch of shopping and cleaning and laundry ahead of the event. On the other hand, it is very annoying to not be able to just drink a glass of water. Way more annoying than I originally thought it would be.

**Hearing and deafness are complicated, but the gist is that I can hear some things. I don’t just live in silence all the time. What I can hear is mostly not very useful, so I mostly ignore the input except in specific situations. Some of my hallucinations are like what I could hear when I was hearing, and some of them are exactly like what I normally can hear now.

An inaccessible play about the importance of accessibility

I started a fight on Facebook, but I'm not sorry.

Open letter to everyone involved in the production of The Monkey Queen:

I’m writing to express my deep disappointment that this production involves the use of American Sign Language (ASL), but did not involve any consultation or collaboration with any members of Missoula’s Deaf community, and does not include any performances with ASL interpretation. The show looks like a really interesting production and it is great to see deaf characters and sign language included in public performance art. However, this particular production is problematic on two main counts: the “ASL Consultant” is neither deaf nor fluent in the language, and none of the shows are accessible to the Deaf community.

There are many deaf people in Missoula, including several with dance/performance backgrounds. Hiring a beginner-level hearing person as the ASL consultant both eliminated a potential role for Deaf artists to be involved, and resulted in inaccurate and poorly performed signing. (I have not seen the show, and don’t plan to- I do not support inaccessible theater. However, preview videos available on social media provide plenty of evidence for this assertion.) The person listed as the ASL consultant is not fluent, is not a member of the Deaf community, and is not qualified to provide consultation on theatrical ASL. A Deaf person should have been hired for the role.

The fact that no interpreted performances are scheduled adds insult to injury. The publicity materials for this work include the use of ASL as a selling point, but the work did not involve collaboration with ASL users and is not accessible to them. According to Matt Loehrke, the writer/director (and the Education Director for the Missoula Children’s Theater), The Monkey Queen provides “a young audience an introduction to these styles of performance, both enlightening them to ASL performance and empowering them to explore ASL after the performance.” Unfortunately, it is clear from the lack of accessibility that Loehrke’s conception of “a young audience” does not include any of the deaf or hard-of-hearing children in the Missoula area.

Both of these issues- the lack of a Deaf ASL consultant and the lack of accessibility for the performances- are deeply problematic. Deaf people are a historically and currently marginalized group, and using our language as a selling point without collaboration or access is an act of linguistic and cultural appropriation. Again according to Loehrke, “The use of ASL is a pivotal plot point that demonstrates enlightenment and empowerment.” It would be nice if enlightenment and empowerment were also available to members of the community being represented. The show should have had a deaf consultant for both content and ASL, and should have planned on providing full access via ASL interpretation for all performances.

I hope that you will consider an apology to the Deaf Community for the cultural appropriation in this work, and that in future projects you will consult with actual members of the cultures you are representing.

Cecily Whitworth

ASL translation:


Show's page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2285630008345681/

Dissatisfied

Remember last year when I went all Discourse Analysis all over everything and explained about how expressive Josh Castille's face is and how much I love his depiction of Eliza having hearts in her eyes? Well, I do. I watch that video all the fuckin time. (Lindsay said she was going to show it to a class to talk about constructed dialogue until she realized that her students couldn't keep track of two characters in a single timeline with no narrator, so she didn't. But anyone who is teaching advanced ASL students and/or linguistics should consider it.)

Now there's a new and improved one




There are a tiny number of places where I liked the first version more- notably, the scene of Angelica introducing Hamilton to Eliza, and then soon after that the line "what might have been if I hadn't sized him up so quickly". But overall this is a really, really skilled  translation that is even more beautiful than the original one. It is extremely fun to watch, with or without the sound on. And I am still in awe of Joshua Castille's role-switching virtuosity.

NB1: in addition I love his suit.

NB2: Alexander is a lot taller in this version. I'm curious about that change!

NB3: This video is a great example for talking about the difference between translation and interpretation, and also a great example of a deaf person making an excellent translation of a song. Hearing people love to get all worked up and enthusiastic about the "signers" doing songs at concerts and on YouTube and whatnot, but those people are nearly always interpreters (not translators) and nearly always hearing. This means that they are converting English to ASL in real time (so a time lag is inevitable) and they are far more focused on meaning than form. (the primary goal is accurate transmission of what the lyrics say, not of whatever rhyming or assonance or other poetic stuff might be going on.)



Translators, on the other hand, get the material and work with it slowly. They take the lyrics (or the poem or whatever) and think hard about how to best respresent the meaning and have the ASL be poetic instead of prosaic. This process takes a long time and a lot of practice and revision, and a deep love and understanding of ASL, and the willingness and skill to create poetry. The result is ASL that is as fun to watch as the English input was fun to listen to.



Most hearing people (even hearing people who know ASL, and know and respect deaf people and their culture, and even many interpreters) and many deaf people, do not, deep down, think of ASL as a real language. One of the ways I know this is how many conversations I've had about translation choices for songs and poems. They are so removed from the English! Why are they doing it this way? The ones on YouTube that hearing signers make, sign-for-word, are so much easier!



But imagine that you know another spoken language (or maybe you don't have to imagine it! I salute you, my friend.). Contemplate the ability to communicate fluently, and/or interpret in real-time, in that language, and compare it to the ability to come up with a quality translation of an English song or poem. Obviously you won't be able to just switch out the English words- that's not how languages work. And some of the idioms and metaphors will need to be replaced. But most crucially, the form will get all messed up. The rhymes won't rhyme, and you won't have the same number of feet per line, and you'll have to build up everything else that makes a poem poetic, from scratch (for songs, while also making it match the rhyme and rhythm of the English version.)

(This is why "translate a song into ASL" is a terrible, awful, very bad idea for ASL teachers to assign as a student project. The students will all do a very bad job, for one thing, but also it further enshrines the idea that translating something into ASL involves word-for-word or line-for-line substitution of English, rather than intense creative work.)



I personally think translating poetry is a nearly worthless enterprise (or I guess I just don't think it makes sense to call the result a translation. It is a new English poem based on whatever starting material.) but my point is that it requires a very high level of skill, and translating songs adds even more difficulty because now you have to match the music, and so it is really impressive when people do it so well like all these videos I linked, and really dispiriting when other different people flood the internet with word-for-word versions by hearing signers instead of these amazing productions by deaf artists.

So. The struggle to get society (including many deaf people) to internalize the idea that ASL is a language, and not a code for expressing English, is not over.

NB4 Yes I do know that NB3 was basically the whole blog post. You're not the boss of me, shut up.

Special is as special does

Hey! Remember that time, more than a year ago, when I was all "sadly, I am quitting my volunteer position at Special Olympics of Montana [SOMT] because Special Olympics of Montana has decided they are going to die on the "deaf people don't deserve interpreters" hill and I won't be a party to it"?

Well, the initial hearing for the lawsuit described therein is JUST NOW wrapping up, because SOMT has a lot of extremely unusual takes on many things (not the least of which is, which makes more sense, to employ lawyers for more than a year to fight a PR disaster of a lawsuit, or to just pay for some fucking interpreters like the all-inclusive charitable sweetheart of America we claim to be? pardon whose-ever French you take that to be) and the number of assessments and depositions and delays is approaching Dickensian-copyright-infringement level (I mean if reality could infringe on copyright and also if Dickens were not in the public domain).

(Write a more ridiculous run-on sentence than that, I dare you.)

Anyway, this is just a note to say that the underlying premise of the defense is that people who are both deaf and intellectually disabled do not, according to SOMT, deserve the same access to communication and information that non-deaf athletes get, or that non-intellectually-disabled deaf people get. SOMT is so dedicated to this principle that they are willing to spend years and who knows how much money in court rather than just hire some interpreters like a non-evil nonprofit organization would do.

Please keep in mind that, according to their very own website, SOMT ran a $1 million surplus in FY 2016 and a $3.6 million surplus in FY 2017.  Also keep in mind that local programs ("teams" in regular English) are expected to cover 100% of their own expenses, including travel, facilities rental, equipment, and registration fees. Finally, the entire organization, barring a few state-office administrators, is staffed by volunteers.

A number of people have asked me, "What is the National Special Olympics organization's position on this?" and "Are the Special Olympics organizations in other states also evil in this particular way?" and I do not know the answer to either question. I encourage you to investigate! Particularly if you are a reporter for some sort of nationally-recognized news outlet!

What I do know is that this particular organization, Special Olympics of Montana, claims to "[change] lives through the power of sport by encouraging and empowering people with intellectual disabilities, promoting acceptance for all, and fostering communities of understanding and respect."

And what I also know is that refusing to provide interpreters for deaf athletes and volunteers in the first place, and then digging your heels in to fight the inevitable lawsuit inspired by that refusal, are both actions that are fundamentally incompatible with encouraging/empowering people, promoting acceptance for all, or fostering understanding and respect.

Unless you think deaf people, and maybe intellectually disabled people, aren't actually people. In which case you maybe should be running a different nonprofit.

Progress report

Lindsay came to visit! If we had had our act together, we would have recorded a vlog of some sort (dog, grog, and/or Yule Log) or at least taken some documentary photographs of ourselves together, but instead we just drank a ton of beer and gossiped about Academics We Have Known. It was a lovely time.

Meanwhile, Big weighs 117 pounds these days but still can't get into a car without a stepstool. She remains inexplicably terrified of a number of unpredictable things, but also prone to gallop up to every person she sees, to lean on them and gaze adoringly into their face while they tell her how pretty she is.

I made another queen-size bed quilt and may never make a bed quilt again. Or at least not until I have an actual quilting machine. They are nice to look at but an unreasonably long and boring project, I've decided.

More later, I need several naps now.

Apocalypse soon

I said something flippant about how the world as we know it is not going to last much longer. (I believe this, although I have no specific predictions.) A friend who is cheerfuller than I am argued a little and then said "but don't you think if you had kids, you'd think differently?" (She has kids.)

This is crazy talk! I certainly hope not! The strangest part of the question, to me, was the implication that I should consider a hypothetical scenario in which I were more likely to have a biased assessment based on wishful thinking, and then use that hypothetical biased assessment instead of my current one. What!? No! I try hard to keep my current level of bias and wishful thinking out of my assessments of things! Why would I add more, just to come up with a nicer outcome? (...oh. Just to come up with a nicer outcome. This is how religions are invented, people.)

Anyway I said "no, but I'd probably be a lot more upset about it" and then we talked about other cheerfuller things.

***

More recently, someone else was telling me that they try to never vote Democrat or Republican. If there's a Libertarian option, the go with that. (It's Montana, so there usually is). If there isn't, they pick Republican.

I said "that makes me think you never read the news and you have no idea what's going on in the world. Have you noticed what the Republicans are doing?"

He said "What about what the Democrats are doing?"

I said "What are the Democrats doing?"

He said "They're dividing us! With their... words and arguments!"

I said "That sounds like something you heard on Fox News. Maybe you should try some other sources."

He said "I'm just kidding. And I don't watch Fox News."

I don't know which part he was kidding about, but this conversation did not change my opinion about how the world as we know it is not going to last much longer. (It did make me glad there are Libertarian options for nearly every race here.)

I'm saying that our system is in failure more than that we don't know what's wrong with it

 I wrote this last year:

Here's what I've learned from having a [mysterious, undiagnosed] debilitating chronic illness: When you have a system that's in failure, and you don't know what's wrong with it, you have to keep going. You have to keep trying to fix it, even though you lose hope, each time, that a new remedy will have any effect. You have to keep making plans for next week even though you might be too sick to show up. You have to pretend, to everyone else and to yourself, that there is a possibility that things will get better. You have to pretend to believe that someday soon somebody is going to identify the source of the problem and they will know how to fix it and your insurance will pay for the fixing and everything will go back to normal. You have to keep behaving like you believe this, even when you're sure it's just going to get worse and worse. You have to say to yourself "if there WERE a possibility that things would get better, what would I need to be doing with my time?" And then you keep going to see more doctors, and you keep trying new cures, and you keep alleviating the symptoms as much as you can, and you keep behaving as though you believe there is a chance  that it will get better soon. You have to, because no matter how doomed and hopeless you think the situation is, what if you're wrong?

It is about American politics (to make that explicit). The bad that things were then seems relatively innocuous beside the bad that things are now. (My health is about the same.)

My unconventional religious beliefs about the Constitution Gods* aside, this place** is on a slippery slope to hell in a handbasket without a paddle. I personally believe we're past the point of no return, which is scary and sad. On the other hand, we*** live in unimaginable luxury compared to nearly everyone in the world, in all of history. So I say bask in the Amazon delivery and air conditioning while it lasts. Also gather roses.

And using both hands, I hope everyone keeps fighting as hard as they can until the fat lady on the ship stops singing.

* I don't actually believe in them.****
** The US? The First World? Earth? D. All of the above?
*** The kind of people who read my blog and their associates
**** Or do I?

Straw [M|B]an

Straw Ban Man
If I didn't feel certain that the Founding Fathers are going to return any day now, sailing down the Potomac in all their glory to advance us all to the next level, I would be worried about climate change. I would still not support any bans on plastic straws, though, because they don't solve the problem and they actively hurt vulnerable people.

They Don't Solve the Problem
If there's any hope of saving the world (don't worry, there's not), it's going to involve a lot of sacrifices on a lot of levels from the wealthiest of us. (Us being humanity, not Americans, although that too.) Using fewer plastic straws should certainly be a component of that! Let's all not use straws if we don't need them. Let's also work on getting rid of all the all the HumVs and oil drilling and leaky pipelines and frivolous air travel and to-go boxes and extra packaging and microdermabrasion beads. Let's pass laws forcing restaurants to provide biodegradable straws even though they're more expensive. Hey! Let's ban restaurants from sending food home in STYROFOAM BOXES for christ's sake. And please let's ban coal rollers! Ban ordering shit from Amazon instead of going to the store on your way home! (Maybe Jeff Bezos could use some of his extra dollars to switch to biodegradable packaging in the Amazon boxes instead of space travel?) Starting with plastic straws is ridiculous, which is not problematic per se, but besides being ridiculous it actively hurts people who don't deserve it and shouldn't have to.

Bans Actively Hurt Vulnerable People
Many disabled people need straws to drink. Reusable or paper straws are a workable solution for some, but not all. Banning plastic straws would make these people's already disenfranchised lives even more full of barriers. Having prescriptions or special permits for straws puts the burden of accessibility on disabled people, who are already spending way too much energy fighting for rights and access, instead of on the venue. In this country we already force disabled people to live in poverty, remain unmarried, and endure stares, condescension, and criticism every time we are out in public. We already have to argue for hours to get interpreters or find out if a place is wheelchair-accessible or be let into a bar with our fucking guide dog. Strangers already harass us for parking in reserved spots and for buying a bottle of wine and for just being out of the house after 5:00. Let's not add to the difficulties we're already forcing disabled people to face. Let's think of a different way.

Straw Man Ban
Luckily in real life we don't have to worry about any of this because like I said, Abe Lincoln is gonna be swimming up that Potomac to save us all real soon now, and I'm sure that whereever he takes us there will be high-quality biodegradable bendy straws for everyone.

Completely Multipurpose

The puppy got bigger. Never having seen more water than is in her bowl, she found the wading pool I put in the front yard terrifying and spent three days circling it, barking suspiciously. Then I made her go camping at the lake.

After cowering in my lap for a while, she waded in and realized she loves water. Aw, what an adorable dummy. (She loves the wading pool, now, too.)

***

I have several interesting things to say but not the energy to type them up.  Instead, here is a picture of the most delightful storefront in all the land:

I drive past it pretty often but I've never been in. I can't decide if I want to or not- what if it's terrible? I'd rather cling to my illusions. On the other hand, I would really like to know which items specifically they sell in there. What a conundrum!

Plus One

Here's what I did last week:

 

 

 I drove to California. It was summer there. I got a puppy.

Then we drove back home. Now it is naptime.

Telescoping Reduction

This blog post will be of interest to an extremely limited audience.

A long time ago (ten years at least!) I noticed this phonetic fact about ASL: when fluent signers sign things that include a repeated gesture, the gesture often becomes smaller with each repetition. I made up a name for it: Telescoping Reduction.

Eventually I wrote a paper about this fascinating topic. I was in the middle of revising it for Language when my life went upside down. I still think it's interesting, though, and things have stabilized enough that I started thinking about linguistics again. "I should go back and finish that paper" was one of my thoughts, and then "I don't care about my CV any more!" was another. It is very freeing, not to care about my CV and not to have any reviewers or editors. (The downside is that editors make your work better and so this paper has infelicitous clauses all over the damn place.)

Anyway, for the 3-4 people who will find this a fascinating topic to discuss, here it is, in all its glory. (That's a 33-page pdf about phonetics and phonology. There are no cranky rants or amusing anecdotes. You have been warned.)

IT JUST SO HAPPENS

Here's a thing that I hate: someone (usually a journalist or a reviewer or something) is describing someone else. It is a man, or a woman, and they have a job, and sometimes they have an age or a location or something. And then, they also "just happen" to have a disability.

This happens SO OFTEN, and it makes me scream/groan every time because how do you not see what a low-key insulting patronizing othering BULLSHIT way to refer to people this is?*

You know where just so happens belongs? In a fairy tale. Or a whimsical anecdote of some sort. Or the Bible.

Not everyone liked the king of Persia. In fact, two of his servants decided they would kill him. Now it just so happened that Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, heard these two servants discussing their evil plan. He told Esther, who told the king for him, and the murder was prevented. Grateful, the king just so happened to write what Mordecai had done for him in his record book. And then, it just so happened that, for the time being, the king forgot all about it.

And you know what it means? It means that the narrator is introducing an unexpected coincidence of some sort. For example, The prince just happens to be riding through the forest when he hears Rapunzel singing and falls in love. MacGyver just happens to have exactly the necessary tools and knowledge to escape whichever trap he's in. Russia just happened to hack the US election system the same year Donald Trump was running.

Do you know what is not an unexpected coincidence? When a person has an interesting job or has created some interesting product or has said or done something interesting, and also the person has a disability. Swap in another characteristic to see how ludicrous and shitty this sounds. "Cecily is a cranky, sporadic blogger who also happens to live in Montana!" "Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany who just so happens to be a woman." "Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States and he also just happens to be black!"

It's weird, dudes. Cut it out. I know it's some well-intentioned but misguided attempt to act like "hey, I'm cool, disability is no big deal and I'm TOTALLY NOT FOCUSING ON IT it's just, like, a coincidence, man!"  But this phrasing actually has the opposite effect. You're drawing attention to it and labeling it as unexpected and unusual. Lots of people have disabilities. All of them do things and say things and generally exist as members of society. There is no surprising coincidence.

You don't need to dance around disability in your description- just say it (if it's relevent) like you say all the other descriptive facts you're including. No coy Biblical/fairy-tale highlighting needed.


*I know this also happens for other "unexpected" characteristics, where it is equally shitty and irritating. She's a successful business executive who JUST SO HAPPENS to also be a loving mother! What a plot twist!

I also know some people with disabilities use this phrasing when talking about themselves. Obviously everyone is allowed to describe themselves the way they want, and if you want more space between yourself and whatever characteristic you just so happen to have, so be it. My complaint is with the sappy journalism overuse, which I think displays discomfort and internalized ableism rather than informed and conscious distancing.

Out in the wild

One time, teaching an upper-level college class, I assigned a paper: “Compare and contrast the American Deaf community with another minority group in the United States." Among other results, I obtained this sentence:

It is much easier to spot an African-American person than it is to spot a Deaf person.

That class was full of glittering gems. (Also some very nice insightful discussions and lots of lovely students.)

Anyway. Tricky though it may be, if you do spot a Deaf person, and you are in a restaurant when it happens, I have written up some advice about how to behave.

Grice Gricey and the Conversational Maxims

Don't you think that would be a good band name? All the linguists and sociologists would flock to your shows. (My grad students always really hated this joke. I made it a lot and everyone groaned and rolled their eyes every time. I think it's hilarious, though, so I win.)

Paul Grice was a guy who studied language, last century, and one of the things he came up with was a self-help book for lonely, shy, and bored people called Grice's Conversational Maxims.

That was false. He did not write a self-help book of any sort. But he did come up with theory of what the unspoken rules are for "How to Have a Successful Conversation with Another Human." Under this theory, when people are having a conversation, there is a set of rules that everyone uses. As long as we're all using the same conventions, we will successfully be able to communicate with each other!

[It turns out that much of linguistics just involves writing out, explicitly, things that everybody knows.]

Here's what to keep in mind, when you decide you want to contribute to a conversation:

1. Maxim of Quality: 
Try to make your contribution one that is true.

• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

2. Maxim of Quantity:
Make your contribution as informative as is required

• (for the purposes of the exchange).
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

3. Maxim of Relation:
Be relevent.

4. Maxim of Manner:
Be perspicuous.

1. Be brief
2. Be orderly
3. Avoid obscurity of expression.
4. Avoid ambiguity.

And if you follow these easy instructions, you too can participate in the New Fad of Conversation! Some assembly required.

Really now we say that most people follow the Cooperative Principle, instantiated in various ways in different places and circumstances. People who routinely flout any rules generally get a negative reaction from their surrounding humans.  The Cooperative Principle says that any time you have a conversation, you are cooperating with someone else in a joint effort at communicating. Violations of the norms communicate something, too- hostility, or a funny joke, or a very different mindset, or a hallucinogen.

[I dearly love the phrase "Grice's Conversational Maxims" and I will never call them anything else.]

We were talking about Grice's Conversational Maxims the other day at a barbecue (as were the all the rest of you, I'm sure) and it suddenly struck me that all the problems in the government can be explained by the fact that President Trump doesn't obey the Maxims consistently. He's playing with different rules, and he knows what the rules of the game are and his interlocutors don't.  Many misunderstandings and frustrations ensue. (Also there may be some other reasons too.)

I would not have guessed it, but this turned out to be a surprisingly successful tactic. Trump gets to assume good will and cooperation from other people, but he arbitrarily switches between Cooperative and Uncooperative, and very little communication happens, however long the conversation goes on. It's like playing bridge without deciding which bidding conventions to use first (surely a universally understood analogy). The resulting "conversations" are sufficiently confusing (and unexpected and unprecedented) that no one knows what to do or how to handle it. No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition! In the short run, he is winning, in the LARP game he thinks we're playing. As long as he is winning, he doesn't really care what you think the rules are.

If he were in a different game, though, where winning required obeying Grice's Conversational maxims, he'd be really bad at it and lose immediately. So all we have to do is get the Senate to create a place where Trump has to go, and where violating Grice has severe negative effects. It's a trap! Who's with me?

I'm gonna make t-shirts and signs that say "Always Obey Grice's Maxims!" and proselytize in DC, around Capitol Hill. Advocate strict enforcement. Convince some powerful politicians to take this seriously. Every meeting from now on, everybody has to sign an agreement to play using Grice Rules. Get the Senate to adopt the maxims officially in their Rules book. Then hold some meeting that the President will need to attend and speak. He'll violate a maxim in his first three utterances- immediately out of the game. (For the purpose of this plan, I am assuming that the Senate Code of Conduct and their Rules book override every other jurisdiction/authority, and that amendments to both involve short, straightforward processes. If this turns out not to be the case, some revision may be necessary.)

Flagrantly violating Grice Gricey is not an effective long-term strategy, anyway. We hope. People get really mad when you violate even one Maxim, and Trump ignores them all half the time, so everyone's getting more and more angry. Eventually nobody will play with the kid who's always trying to change the rules. His turn will be over someday. Unless he throws the board or changes the rules.

N.B. He does seem like the kind of guy who might throw the board or change the rules.