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Transcription: [00:09:01]
{SPEAKER name="Dick Moore/Sheila Grinell (interpreter)"}
I'll be worrying about being electrocuted if I'm getting up from the bathtub and put on the phone because I have to type through the electric machine!
[00:09:12]
{SPEAKER name="Jo Radner"}
Be careful.
Steve, I wonder if you, as a fairly recent comer I guess near the Deaf community could say something about how you first noticed there was a Deaf community, and what it was like to get to know a number of Deaf friends and actually join them at work and so on.
[00:09:30]
{SPEAKER name="Steve Jones"}
I came to work at the Washington Post about 10 years ago. And, about one fifth of the printers at the Washington Post are Deaf.
[00:09:39]
It's sort of been a traditional occupation for Deaf because it relies mostly on visuals, you don't have to need a lot of vocal instruction.
[00:09:48]
And I came to work there, and I would have a Deaf person standing here and a Deaf person here, Deaf people in front of me, Deaf people behind me, and I'm the only hearing person in the shop.
[00:10:00]
And they're just talking all this beautiful sign language around me. I have no idea what they're talking about.
[00:10:05]
So it was a choice between my learning sign language or not communicating so I learned sign language.
[00:10:11]
Somebody asked yesterday how long it takes to learn sign language, Jan said it takes a lifetime because it's a constantly changing language, like any working language is.
[00:10:22]
But the alphabet is fairly simple. You can learn the alphabet in about a half an hour if you try.
[00:10:27]
I started with my roommate, another hearing man, and we memorized the alphabet. And then we would practice by reading the newspaper to each other. Just in fingerspelling.
[00:10:36]
But I'm fortunate in that I work with so many Deaf people and I can use it every day. Most people don't have that opportunity.
[00:10:42]
But if you know any Deaf people at all, or any hearing-impaired people that speak sign language, if you try to learn a little bit of sign language you'll be surprised at how encouraging Deaf people are to help you improve.
[00:10:55]
{SPEAKER name="Jo Radner"}
It's perhaps, uh, perhaps useful to mention that fingerspelling isn't really all there is to sign language.
[00:11:04]
In fact fingerspelling is a way of borrowing English words on occasion, just the way we borrow French words and German words when we're speaking English. Or English words when we're speaking German.
[00:11:15]
Signs themselves are quite different. Sign language in America is not derived from the English language or based on its structure at all.
[00:11:24]
However, one custom in Deaf folklore which we might ask Dick perhaps to demonstrate now, does rely on these letters of the alphabet and turn them into a story that's not in the English language that those letters represent.
[00:11:40]
A story that is actually by a kind of sleight-of-hand, if I can say that, by a kind of sleight-of-hand translated into a real sign language story as a kind of a game.
[00:11:51]
Dick, do you think you could explain something about what an alphabet fingerspelling story is? And show us?
[00:11:58]
{SPEAKER name="Dick Moore/Sheila Grinell (interpreter)"}
You mean from full A to Z? Oof
{SPEAKER name="Jo Radner"}
Well, well maybe a shorter one. How 'bout a word?

Transcription Notes:
Dick Moore is voiced by an interpreter.