My new SignWriting Hoodie from Cafe Press

[Adam Frost]

I bought a hoodie from Cafe Press a while back for two reasons. Washington DC has winters that Los Angeles, California does not. ;-P And I thought that having SignWriting visible on me would be a good reason to get conversations started while I am at Gallaudet. It is really interesting that people would try to read what it said. I mean, I had people stare at my hoodie from across the room trying to figure it out. Then they would come up to me and ask me if it means this or that, or even just flat out ask me what it means. When I would tell them and show them how to read it, they would say they could see it. Then they would ask me what it is. I'd tell them it is SignWriting and then they would see the web link on the bottom and say, "oh, I see. I will check out the link." I have not once gotten a negative response of any sort. But I think that most people here really don't know much about SignWriting that they wouldn't have anything negative to say about it. 

It was also interesting how SignWriting came up in one of my classes. The teacher was talking about various systems that have been and/or are used to record ASL. He was reading an old article written in SignWriting to the class (probably from the old SW newspaper). There was one sign that he read completely wrong, and I corrected him and proceeded to explain to him why it was what I said with a short reading lessen. ;-) He asked me how I knew. I thought it was funny that I was wearing my hoodie at the time and I told him that I work with Val. Bob Johnson says Hi, Val. ;-)

I really am glad that I have gotten the hoodie from Cafe Press. I think I will get some other things for conversational starters. I am also going to see about getting other sentences so that way people will not see the same thing. ;-) I think that everyone could find something that would make good conversational starters about SignWriting. It also will make it so people see that SW isn't "dead" as some people have told me they thought. :-)

Adam

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: IMG_0215.jpeg
Type: image/jpg
Size: 24456 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20110220/e77d236d/attachment.jpg>