NEW: Clown correction

[Adam Frost]

I'm assuming the sign you are referring to is:



While I personally don't do it with this down movement, we aren't talking about that at the moment. ;-)

Technically speaking, the hand symbol is the correct one for what the symbol was intended to mean. If you look at the book that Val and I just wrote, the image of my hand and the symbol match.



 I know that the thumb seems to be on the wrong side; so do the fingers. There is a reason for that. This isn't official because I need to test it, but from personal observation I have found that when a handshape has the thumb interacting with the other fingers (ie as if it can hold a physical object), the symbol construction points the fingers to the center of the body and is static and does not rotate like most of the other symbols. So this hand symbol falls in that category. 

Now, my understanding is that there are some who say that these hand symbols should rotate just like the other symbols. That means this writing of clown should be:



The problem is that since the hand is on the left side of the face, many readers feel that is for the left hand as opposed to the right hand. That is the reason all those symbols were made static and not rotate like the rest.

I hope this helps clarify why the hand symbol used is actually not wrong.

Adam

On Sep 12, 2011, at 9:00 AM, Charles Butler wrote:

> Please look at "CLOWN" on the ASL Sign Puddle.
> 
> The fingers point to the right and the hand is white, therefore it is the left hand, yet the arrows indicate the right hand. if you turn it at a slight angle then the thumb is clearly on the wrong side, pointing up the axle on the left side of the square. This, to me, is the easiest test. 
> 
> If I were to see this sign in an ASL SW exam I would mark it wrong. This is not a matter of "variant" this is simply wrong. 
> 
> If I cannot mark a test unambiguously then there is something wrong. The hand is not "pinching the nose" from the side it is "facing the nose".
> 
> As I can't edit it, I can't fix it.
> 
> Charles Butler
> 

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