To include or not include?

[Grushkin, Donald A.]

Folks:

I would like your opinion on something.  I am compiling a bilingual
ASL-English dictionary, that I am striving to be as comprehensive as
possible beyond anything we have seen to date.  To this end, I have been
consulting a number of sources, and one of the sources is Woodward's books
on Signs of Sexual and Drug behavior.  My wife believes I should not include
these signs, because she feels it is not appropriate to do so, and if young
deaf children should get their hands on this dictionary, they could be
learning the signs as well.  Plus, I do know that the Deaf community
generally doesn't like Hearing people looking up the "dirty" signs just to
know the "dirty" stuff.

On the other hand, I feel that if English dictionaries such as my copy of
Webster's has 4-letter words and offensive terminology in it, then why
shouldn't an ASL dictionary?  Don't people learning sign have the right to
be able to look up the meaning of something if they should happen to see it,
or Deaf people the means to translate what they know?  Don't Hearing
children see these 4-letter words in the dictionaries as well?

One solution to this that I thought of was to have two editions... the
"abridged", "clean" version, and an unabridged version.

Another solution is to partially prevent Hearies from looking up the signs
by not including them in the English-to-ASL part, but only in the
ASL-to-English part, so if they should SEE it, they can find out it's
meaning, but they wouldn't easily be finding the sign itself if they didn't
know how to sign it.

Any thoughts?

Donald A. Grushkin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor/Coordinator, ASL Program
Eureka Hall Rm. 312 (Campus Zip # 6079)
California State University, Sacramento 95819
(916) 278-6622 Voice; 278-3465 TTY