Some of my friends have taken to using an expression that originated from “Engrish” (a collection of grammatical errors made by non-native speakers of English). It started out as kind of an in-joke, but then proved so useful and expressive that it now pops up in our normal conversations. Instead of saying, “Let’s go get a pizza” or “Do you want to go for a bike ride?”, we say, “Let’s pizza” or “Let’s biking”.

I’ve also noticed that certain new words will pop up on the internet every so often; blogs often have an option to “friend” someone, meaning link your blog to theirs and make your posts viewable to them and vice versa. “I friended him” could translate from blogspeak into meatspeak.

In many of the relationship-defining sentences referenced above, the ASL construction works really differently from English. You could use a sign for “my mom”, so you could say something like “this woman my mom” in ASL. But if you were involved in a conversation in which you referred to your mom several times, you set up a construction where you locate your mom in an actual physical space at your current location. So the spoken English interpretation comes across something like, “You see this space right here on my left? This space represents my mother.” And then in future references, you reference your mother by pointing at that space.

In my (very amateur) experience with ASL, the construction of the language goes to great lengths to avoid referencing something that isn’t happening now and in this space, even to the extent of importing people and events to the present tense and location. Super interesting, I think.

Thanks Scout for posting it.