5 Reasons Life as a Deaf Person Is Weirder Than You Thought

5 A Few Botched Hand Motions Can Ruin Your Life

A couple of years ago, during a sign language performance in a music video, some complained that the interpreter accidentally signed the word "tampon" instead of "appear." How is that possible? Well, here's the ASL sign for "appear," according to the online guide at American Sign Language University:

Yeah, you can use your imagination there. In one context, that sign can in fact mean "to appear," and in another it can mean, well, to insert something.

Hey, remember that crazy story of a dangerous attempted murderer getting on stage with President Obama because he pretended to be a sign language interpreter for Nelson Mandela's funeral? And how it turned out it wasn't even the first time he'd done that? That happened because so few people know a damned thing about sign language that a crazy guy making random hand motions fooled the security details of multiple nations' heads of state. And while that's just an oddball story to you, this is the kind of thing that can ruin a deaf person's life.

Let me give you a less hilarious example: I have a friend whose sister is deaf. She was in the hospital for a simple operation, and the sign language interpreter, like many, wasn't qualified to be doing it and accidentally told her the doctor had botched the surgery. When my friend arrived, her sister was tearfully saying her goodbyes. And if you're wondering how you could accidentally convey something so radically incorrect, see the "tampon" situation above.

Translators now have a national registry and a professional code of conduct, but, obviously, progress is slow. Many organizations don't have things like "ASL tested" or "vaguely qualified" people, and that can lead to screw-ups in pretty important places. Like courtrooms. Cases have been thrown out after the judgment when the tiniest amount of digging revealed that the interpreter wasn't qualified and botched the interpretation. Imagine if the lunatic from Mandela's funeral wound up translating your testimony at trial. And even when the interpreter knows what he's doing, legal interpreting is complicated as hell -- something like the Miranda rights can take up to 20 minutes to get across. The potential for disaster there is huge.

All of this means that ...

4 Misunderstandings Are Constant, and Baffling

In general, people don't understand much about deaf people (we use the capital D to refer to the culture). I've had to interpret before in situations where a person blatantly asked me to fill out forms or answer questions about the deaf person, as if he or she was a child or mentally challenged. "They can't hear, so clearly they need a legal guardian to handle life for them, even though they're middle-aged adults." It's kind of like the assumption a lot of people make that foreigners who don't speak their language must be "dumb," even if the person happens to be in that foreigner's home country, shouting at them in English. There's just something about the human brain that makes us look down on anyone who can't say words in a way we like to hear them.

I've found that the whole concept of deafness just blows people's freaking minds. I've been asked several times how long it took me to learn Braille. I also frequently get asked if deaf people can drive. Yes, of course they can, and why wouldn't they? "Well, they can't hear what's going on. That's dangerous, right? What if there's an ambulance behind them?" To which my reply is, have you ever turned the radio up in your car? No? Well, congratulations on being a liar, but those of us in the real world spend a significant part of the commute with our eardrums otherwise occupied.

"Can you have children?" is another one deaf people get, along with the follow-up question, "Aren't you afraid your children will be deaf?" If they already have children, the question becomes, "Aren't you sad you'll never hear your child's voice?" None of these are valid questions, because of course deaf people can have children, will be perfectly happy if their children are deaf, and don't hear anything, so not hearing their child's voice doesn't really bum them out. Seeing their child make their first sign is plenty.

Even weirder, they'll often be told, "You don't look deaf," or the even more baffling variation, "You're not really deaf -- you have selective hearing" (and yes, the accusation of not "really" being deaf happens more often than you'd think).

But there are less obvious things you need to be prepared for when dealing with deaf people, like all of the touching. In deaf culture, it's normal to touch someone to get their attention. Not inappropriately, mind you; we're talking "tap on the shoulder," rather than "straight-up groping." But once, while interpreting for a slightly more formal event, a deaf client touched a woman's shoulder so he could discuss something with her. She was startled and flipped out, because in polite society we don't run around grabbing each other. I had to step out of my role for a moment and explain that this wasn't a precursor to an assault.

But even in a situation where everyone involved knows sign language, we're nowhere close to being out of the woods. That's because ...

3 Sign Language Is Way More Complicated Than You Think

Many venerable sources of news, such as the Washington Post, pass off understanding sign language as "translating." God, if only it were that easy. Translation involves text; you can translate a book from German into English. Interpreting is very different. For one thing, signs don't equate directly to words -- deaf people use slang, and the meaning of many signs changes based on the situation (again, "tampons"). And even then, you can run into signs you've never seen before (I once got lost trying to interpret someone telling a story about the birth of their baby before figuring out I was seeing the sign for "midwife" for the first time).

And even that's just talking about American Sign Language. Yep, every single country has its own sign language, and then you have dialects within those countries. So ASL as taught in American schools will only get you around the USA and parts of Canada. And we're not just talking about some adorable "loos" and "lorries" thrown in for color. British Sign Language and ASL have only 31 percent of the same signs. Auslan (Australian sign language, not a Lord of the Rings character) is a mishmash of the American, British, New Zealand, and Irish sign language systems.

You can be multilingual with your hands and never "leave" the United States. Seriously: There's Hawaiian Sign Language, still used by a few elderly people, and Martha's Vineyard had its own sign language going for over 200 years. Good luck communicating with any deaf yacht owners unless you know that. And just like people say "pop" or "soda" for a soft drink, there are tiny areas where words can get tricky. In certain parts of Michigan, the sign that normally means "bug" everywhere else means "horny." I can only imagine that this leads to some tragic orgies.

2 No, There's No Technological Cure for Deafness

"Wait, don't they have a gadget they can implant in your ear that lets you hear again? So why is being deaf even still a thing?"

Well, that's complicated.

First of all, 92 percent of deaf children are born to parents who can hear. I dare you to imagine anything scarier than hearing that your child failed any sort of test given at the two-hours-old mark. There's no way "Your newborn FAILED the hearing test" doesn't send most of them into a panic spiral. This isn't the basis for a whole lot of the world's greatest decision making, but it's also when many parents make the decision to give their baby the cochlear implant intended to restore their hearing.

Now, "implant that makes you hear" is hard to argue with on paper, but it's important to know that cochlear implants aren't just wicked awesome robot ears that give you bionic hearing. If you listen here at the 4:50 mark, you'll hear a lovely woman's voice turned into the digitally synthesized voice of a bad guy on the N64. It's not exactly a seamless replication of reality, is what I'm saying. And it's worse than that for some people.

Don't get me wrong: Cochlear implants help a lot of people, and no one can argue with taking even a minor step toward becoming a RoboCop. But modern implants have a host of problems, outside the obvious one of learning how to hear. The surgery leaves you vulnerable to meningitis, and patients run the risk of a severed nerve paralyzing their damn face. It's a cruel irony that cochlear implants work best in infants, perennial #1 in Cracked's yearly "worst time of life to have major surgery performed" contest.

So in the deaf community, you see a lot of resistance to the implants, and they can get annoyed when the perception becomes "You can fix this problem but are choosing not to, for some reason." If that makes it seems like deaf people are kind of touchy about the subject, keep in mind ...

1 Society Has Traditionally Treated Deaf People Like Garbage

For much of our history, society just didn't know what to do with deaf people. In the B.C. era, the law of the Talmud denied deaf people the right to own land, while St. Augustine in the early A.D.s made deafness a straight-up sin. It wasn't until the 1960s that interpreting for deaf people was even a profession. Before then, deaf people relied on the help of family, teachers of deaf people (like Helen Keller's deaf-blind teacher Anne Sullivan), and the occasional clergyman that learned some signs. If you didn't live in an area with a thriving deaf community, you might as well be cut off from the world entirely.

Educators didn't have a problem with deaf people until the 1880 Conference of Milan. A bunch of hearing people and one token deaf guy got together in Italy to figure out just how deaf people ought to be educated. You can sum up their conclusion as "Fuck sign language, just try real hard to speak." Even today, many deaf people remember having their hands tied and wrists slapped to stop them from trying to sign.

This, as you can imagine, made life a lot more difficult for deaf people and their families. From many (god-awful) parents' standpoint, it was easier to ship them off to a different country or just put them in an institution. To make matters worse, around the same time, Alexander Graham Bell was running amok. The same guy who invented the telephone was actually an inventor/douchebag on par with Thomas Edison. And, like the douchiest bags of his day, Bell was really into the eugenics movement (Hitler found his work inspirational). He spent his life pushing legislation that would force deaf people to undergo surgery to make sure they couldn't have children together and make a "deaf race." Fearing this day, Bell pushed for the abolition of sign language because it brought deaf people together. (Oddly enough, Bell's own mother and wife were deaf. So yeah, probably some awkward holidays for that family.)

This should help explain why deaf people are wary of anyone who claims to be able to "fix" them. Big-D deaf people often oppose cochlear implants, and it isn't because they're anti-technology. It's because they have a distinct culture that people have tried to wipe out. It's not easy feeling like you're doing a pretty damned good job of getting by in life, only to hear a whole group of people look at you and scream, "We have to stop any more unspeakable horrors like this from existing!"

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