Sandy uses her amazing #ASL ability to sign what #Reggae means to her. #shorts #music #diyband #zhzpodcast #musicpodcast #videopodcast #SatWhatWithSandy #signlanguage
Check out the FULL INTERVIEW in PART ONE of this killer episode! ➡️ https://youtu.be/O23j3xT-xo4?si=I3567Y-t3lAOeydJ
#MN #presser #ASL #interpreter #Klobuchar
I'm going to take this time to give kudos to the ASL interpreter who is doing a better job at signing than the lady I saw earlier at an earlier presser for this reason alone:
When ICE was mentioned, she signed "police"; this fellow here did not, and fingerspelled
"I C E". Good job, terp!
Hello Universe!
Moved to new server.
Re-introduction - Been on here since 2022 and should write an intro again. I'm deaf, I'm a fan of open-source projects, so this will be short and sweet.
Post random ramblings, news, techie stuff, boost mostly cat pics. I just like computers and hang around here.
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#NoMoreCraptions | #Disability | #Accessibility
#Inclusion | #Equity | #Ally
#Tech | #Privacy | #Encryption
#OpenSource | #FLOSS
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#Science | #Physics | #Space | #STEM
#SecularHumanist | #Atheist
#Deaf | #ASL
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#Astrophotography | #Photography
#Boricua
Howdy! 👋 Boost for visibility 🙌
#Caserta. #Cani e #gatti sequestrati in una casa-prigione: blitz #ASL - #CarabinieriNAS
Memory in the Meme
We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.
The meme is often dismissed by the serious-minded as the detritus of a distracted generation. It is seen as a low-resolution joke, a lazy way to communicate a thought that should have been an essay. But as someone who has spent a lifetime studying the intersection of the “Human Meme” and the hard realities of communication, from the stageboards of Broadway to the silent, proximal grammar of American Sign Language, I tell you that the meme is something far more curious. It is a vessel of containment. It is the modern amber in which we trap the mosquito of our collective emotion, preserving the DNA of a specific moment in time that would otherwise evaporate into the ether of the forgotten.
Consider the “visual vernacular” of the internet. In American Sign Language, we talk about the power of the classifier—a handshape that represents a class of objects, moving through space to tell a story that words cannot capture. The meme operates on this same frequency. It is a classifier for the soul. When you share an image of a skeleton sitting on a park bench waiting for a reply, you are not just making a joke about patience. You are transmitting a complex, heavy emotional state—the specific, crushing weight of being ignored—without uttering a syllable. You are using a shared visual language to contain a feeling that is too large and too messy to be constrained by the rigid geometry of the English alphabet.
There is a “braided prairie” quality to this phenomenon. Growing up in Nebraska, I learned that the land remembers everything. The wind that cuts through the tall grass carries the same dust that settled on the pioneers. The meme is our digital prairie. It is a vast, open space where millions of individual blades of grass, our individual anxieties, our triumphs, our absurdities, weave together to form a cohesive landscape. When a meme goes viral, it is not because it is clever. It is because it has tapped into the groundwater of that prairie. It has found a common root. It allows us to stand in the middle of the digital nowhere and say, “I am not alone in this feeling. You are here, too.”
This is the function of memory in the meme: it fights the “cultural instinct to forget.” The machine wants us to forget. The algorithm prioritizes the new, the fresh, the “trending.” It wants us to be in a constant state of forward motion because a person who stops to remember is a person who stops clicking ads. But the meme acts as a brake. It is an anchor. It drags the past, a screenshot from a 1999 cartoon, a blurry photo from a 2012 news broadcast, into the present and forces us to reckon with it. It creates a loop of “static time,” freezing a reaction in perpetuity.
I have written before about the tragedy of the “Original Cast Recording”—how it captures a living, breathing theatrical performance and freezes it into a definitive, unchangeable document. The meme does something similar, but with a crucial difference. The cast recording demands you listen to it as it was; the meme invites you to remix it as you are. It is a living archive. It allows us to take the memory of the past and overlay it with the context of the present. It is a collaboration between the dead (the original context) and the living (the current caption).
However, we must be wary of the container itself. We are building our “palace of memory” on rented land. We entrust our cultural heritage to platforms that view our memories as data points to be mined, not treasures to be kept. We are facing a crisis of digital preservation. The “Link Rot” of the web is real. The servers will eventually be wiped. The Technocrats will pull the plug when the storage costs outweigh the ad revenue. And when that happens, what becomes of the memory?
This is why the act of sharing a meme is, in itself, an act of defiance. It is a way of keeping the signal alive. We are the “Human Meme.” We are the biological substrate that keeps these ideas breathing. When you save a meme to your phone, you are acting as an archivist. You are curating the museum of your own existence. You are saying that this specific collision of image and text, this specific containment of irony and truth, matters enough to be saved from the flow.
We must not mistake the trivial for the temporary. A joke can last a thousand years if it touches a truth that the history books are too polite to record. The meme is the folklore of the future. It is the cave painting of the twenty-first century, scratched not into stone, but into the liquid light of the screen. It proves we were here. It proves we saw the absurdity of the world, the horror and the beauty of it, and instead of screaming into the void, we chose to contain it. We chose to frame it. And we chose to share it.
So, the next time you hesitate to post that silly image, remember the weight of what you are doing. You are not just adding noise to the signal. You are preserving the hum of the human condition. You are ensuring that the memory survives the moment. You are telling the future that we were complex, and we were funny, and we were here.
#asl #braidedPrairie #culture #humanMeme #learning #machines #meme #memory #signLanguage #technocrats #thinking
Arm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore
Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The native signer’s shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The student, trained to focus on hands and face, moves through space as if the arms were merely transportation for the fingers. This is the gap that Arm Angles in American Sign Language addresses. It is the textbook we wished existed twenty years ago.
Most ASL instruction concentrates on the parameters everyone agrees matter: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, non-manual markers. These are the building blocks, the phonological primitives that distinguish one sign from another. What gets lost in this necessary attention to fundamentals is the architecture that supports everything else. The arm is not merely a delivery system for the hand. It is an articulator in its own right, and its positioning carries semantic weight that affects meaning, register, and comprehension in ways that intermediate and advanced learners rarely understand explicitly.
Consider the sign UNDERSTAND. In citation form, the index finger flicks upward near the forehead with a wrist movement. The arm positions the hand, but the movement itself is distal, located at the wrist and fingers. Now consider the same sign in emphatic use: the forearm moves, the signing space expands, the shoulder engages. The handshape has not changed. The location has not changed. What has changed is proximal articulation, the engagement of shoulder and elbow and upper arm in the production. That engagement signals emphasis, formality, certainty. Reduce the arm involvement further than citation form and the sign reads as casual, rapid, intimate. The same lexical item carries different pragmatic meaning depending on how the arm participates.
This is what we mean by proximal articulation, and this is what the textbook examines across twelve chapters and comprehensive supplementary materials.
The Collaboration
Janna Sweenie has taught American Sign Language at New York University for over thirty-five years. She created the ASL 5 course for the NYU minor, served as Program Coordinator from 2017 to 2020, and has worked as a consultant for Microsoft, Google, and New York City museums. She is a two-time recipient of the NYU Steinhardt School Administrator Award. She was born Deaf in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf. For eighteen years she has served as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Deaf in the State of New York Department of Education.
David Boles has taught American Sign Language at NYU and other institutions for over two decades. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. His background in dramatic literature informs the textbook’s attention to register, performance, and the expressive possibilities of signed discourse.
Together we have written Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1, Day One: Learning American Sign Language in 24 Hours, Hardcore ASL Textbook for Levels 1-7, and American Sign Language Level 5. Our work spans beginning to advanced instruction, print and video, classroom and self-study. What we have not done until now is write the book that addresses what we kept having to explain in person: why the arms matter, how they function, and what happens when you get them wrong.
What the Textbook Contains
The book opens with anatomy. Not because anatomy is inherently interesting, though it is, but because understanding the skeletal framework, joint system, and muscular apparatus of the signing arm clarifies everything that follows. Why can the shoulder rotate in ways the elbow cannot? Why do certain sign movements fatigue the arm while others remain sustainable? What does neutral position mean anatomically, and why does departure from neutral carry meaning?
From there the textbook moves through the three spatial dimensions of signing space: vertical (height carries semantic information distinguishing verb tenses and marking formality), horizontal (enabling reference establishment and tracking), and sagittal (the temporal plane that maps time onto space, with forward movement indicating future and backward movement indicating past). Each dimension involves arm positioning. Each dimension affects meaning in ways that isolated attention to handshapes cannot capture.
The core theoretical concept is the proximal/distal distinction. Signs produced with more proximal involvement, engaging the shoulder and upper arm as primary articulators, tend to read as more emphatic, more formal, more careful, more public. Signs produced with more distal involvement, wrist and finger movements, tend to read as more casual, more rapid, more intimate, more efficient. This is not absolute. Sign-specific conventions override general tendencies. But the correlation provides a heuristic that helps learners understand how arm engagement affects the social and pragmatic meaning of what they sign.
Subsequent chapters address classifier predicates and arm-as-referent, two-handed coordination and symmetry constraints, elbow mechanics and sign modification, non-manual marker integration with arm positioning, biomechanics and signing health, acquisition and pedagogy, and variation across dialect, generation, and individual style. The final chapter considers future directions in ASL research, including technological developments in sign language recognition and the evolving landscape of ASL instruction.
For Whom This Book Is Written
This is not a beginning textbook. Readers should have completed at least intermediate ASL coursework or possess equivalent proficiency. The book assumes familiarity with basic phonology, parametric structure, and glossing conventions. It is written for advanced students preparing for interpreter certification, working interpreters seeking to refine their skills, ASL instructors developing curriculum for upper-level courses, Deaf education professionals, and researchers in sign language linguistics. It is also appropriate for mature signers who want to understand the theoretical foundations of what they do intuitively.
The supplementary materials include a comprehensive glossary, notation guide for representing arm angles in written form, practical exercises for each chapter progressing from observation to production, self-assessment checklists, and additional resources pointing to video materials and research literature. Instructor materials include lesson plans, syllabus templates, frequently asked questions, observation guides, and assessment rubrics. The book is designed for both independent learners and classroom adoption.
The Problem This Book Addresses
ASL instruction in the United States has improved dramatically over the past four decades. Recognition of ASL as a legitimate language with its own grammar and syntax, rather than a simplified gestural system for the hearing impaired, has transformed both research and pedagogy. Yet instructional materials continue to treat arm positioning as secondary, intuitive, something that will come naturally with exposure. It does come naturally for some learners. For others it does not, and they plateau at a level of competence that never quite reads as fluent even though their vocabulary and grammar are technically correct.
The plateau is not a vocabulary problem. It is not a grammar problem. It is a register problem, a prosodic problem, a spatial problem that lives in the arms. The signer who never learns to modulate proximal and distal articulation across contexts will sign like someone reading aloud from a phrasebook: comprehensible but mechanical, correct but not native. This textbook addresses that gap directly, providing the explicit instruction and theoretical framework that allows learners to understand what they need to practice and why it matters.
Getting the Book
Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse is available now as a Kindle edition for $14.99 at Amazon and paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format or who want to evaluate the textbook before classroom adoption. Additional materials are available at HardcoreASL.com.
The arms have always mattered. Now there is a textbook that explains why, that teaches how, and that gives learners and instructors the tools they need to address what other materials ignore. This is the book we wished we had when we started teaching. We are glad to finally offer it to everyone else.
#angle #armAngles #armMovement #articulation #asl #bolesBooks #davidBoles #direction #iowaSchoolForTheDeaf #jannaSweenie #language #learning #linguistics #medical #proximity #teaching #textbook
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