Looking Out To Sea

I’ve got to record what we did this week at BSL because Helen wasn’t there. And we’ve got homework so I thought I’d write it here so it’s easy to access.

Describing people and animals

We followed on from the previous week, doing more description of animals first, then of people after the break. It’s still really hard to picture what is distinctive about people. Same with animals — there’s always something that’s really stereotypical or indicative but it’s hard to come up with. Last week I was trying to describe a wolf but completely forgot about the “howling at the moon” behaviour, so nobody knew what I was talking about.

This week I managed to convey a goat pretty well, but it’s easier because not many animals butt heads and have long beards. That’s really goatish. I then elected to describe Johnny Rotten, which I thought would be pretty straight-forward. The first guess was Sid Vicious! Meh.

Still pretty difficult to describe without using topic words: to say “23” instead of “age 23” or “blonde” instead of “hair blonde”. It’s the same mindset that has people prefixing every sentence by pointing to themselves. In other words, English grammar.

Holiday

We spent the majority of the lesson covering arrangements for holidays — stuff you need to have, stuff you need to do, that kind of thing. Most of it airport-based, I suppose because it has the most scope for distinctive vocabulary. People use trains to get to work, but departure lounges and x-ray scanners are not day-to-day things.

Let me see, there was “waiting” and “queue” and “lounge” and “complain” and “argument”. You can tell we’ve all been to airports before, right? And “late” but also “early”, “sunglasses” and “midge repellent” and the names of a bunch of different countries.

The sign for Hawaii is good, because it’s like a little grass-skirted hula dance. For the record, Scotland is a stylised bagpipe sign, a sort of one-armed chicken flap. This is apparently called metonymy — referring to one thing by describing something that is related to it. English has this when we talk about “the crown” to mean the monarchy. This happens loads in sign language and is one of the things I really enjoy about it. Some of the examples I’ve seen have been very enlightening and evocative (though naturally I can’t think of any right now).

Homework

For next week we’ve to come up with a two-minute story describing “setting off on holiday”. Everything to the point where the plane takes off, except the decision-making process which is boring. So: packing, readying the house (cancelling milk, etc.), getting money/insurance, leaving for the airport. That should be more than enough for two minutes of presentation.

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