True Biz Quotes

Sign language had been so thoroughly stigmatized that in trying to avoid it, parents had unknowingly opted for a modern version of institutionalization, locking their children away in their own minds.

Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life when you were chasing the wrong dream. And after you´ve experienced that sustained fulfillment , you´ll never want to settle for anything else

So please, don’t judge me. There is no one more disappointing to me than myself.

Being motherless was different than being fatherless. It was primal, the archetype for human suffering, like losing the North Star.

He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood - her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn't yet, all in the perpetual existence in her fingertips.

Of course, that was their privilege-to conflate majority with superiority.

Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true.

The fact that he had done this many times before mitigated the length of the homesickness, but not its intensity.

Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true

Kept apart from one another, deaf children frequently receive not only substandard education without full access to language, but a suppressed understanding of the self that can only be righted by representation and a sense of larger community belonging.

But language bears more than the work of communicating with the mainstream world; it is also the internal vehicle for our thoughts and feelings, the mechanism through which we understand ourselves. Without first having had ASL, I would not have understood myself as a person with a story to tell.

She would learn as much as she could and do whatever she could to dismantle all that she knew to be broken, brick by brick, by hand if she had to. She would keep the bricks, though. She would use them to build something new.

Nine out of ten deaf kids had hearing parents, and those parents held Deaf fate in their hands—the fate of their own children, of course, and the future of the Deaf community at large. Problem being, most parents understood deafness only as explained to them by medical professionals: as a treachery of their genes, something to be drilled out.

That was the problem with hearing people -- you never could tell when they were paying attention.

When people ask Biz about his wealth, he tells them that money rarely changes people; it often just magnifies who they really are.

Her teachers called them “behaviors,” as if any action from a child beyond total compliance was implicitly bad.

It was hard to imagine what the world might be like if deaf people had as short a fuse about hearing people's inability to sign, their neglect or refusal to caption TV, or , hell the announcements on this bus. Of course, that was their privilege--to conflate majority with superiority.

imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain. Usually people scoffed at her and February would nod. It did sound ridiculous. And yet, though fear of bilingualism in two spoken languages had been dismissed as xenophobic nonsense, though it was now desirable for hearing children to speak two languages, medicine held fast to its condemnation of ASL.

Who would hear the secrets we bear?

Lately she'd been thinking that the truly unfair thing was the expectation that another should completely understand another human just because she'd given birth to them.

fewer things were more motivating than a fear of one's own extinction.

It's so damn depressing, February said as she pushed through the side door. That the biggest dream some people can muster up for their child is "look normal.

Reason is for people who still have something to fear.

What cruel disease, she thought, to steal from a person all their best moments, and make them relive the worse ones nightly. To force their loved ones to deliver these blows of memory until they, too, were subsumed by the echoing grief.

DID YOU KNOW? Deaf scholars have proven that Deafness meets the requirements to be considered an ethnicity. Historically this was the common view before oral education nearly eradicated sign languages. Even Alexander Graham Bell, who wanted to rid society of deafness, spoke of “a race of Deaf people.

She wasn't a stranger to this line of questioning--when her fellow students at Jefferson had deigned to engage with her, it was often in exchanges like this, to inform her that they had once had a deaf dog, or inquire why she didn't want to get cured like those babies they'd seen on YouTube hearing their mothers' voices for the first time.

There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite. Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage. Once the window shut, learning anything became difficult, even impossible—without a language, how does one think, or even feel?

Q: Why would a man with a deaf wife and mother want to eradicate sign language? A: Eugenics Eugenics (N.): The practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition IN HIS WORDS: “Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriages of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.” —Alexander Graham Bell, 1883

alexander graham bell, milan 1880, AND WHY YOUR MOM DOESN’T KNOW SIGN LANGUAGE In the late 19th century, manual language versus oral communication for deaf children was a hot topic of debate among educators, embodied by Thomas H. Gallaudet, the cofounder of the American School for the Deaf, and your friendly neighborhood eugenicist, Alexander Graham Bell. Gallaudet, who’d learned sign language from French teacher of the deaf Laurent Clerc, had seen the success of signing Deaf schools firsthand in France, making him a strong proponent of signed languages. But Bell believed deaf people should be taught to speak, and sign language should be removed from Deaf schools.

Black American Sign Language (BASL) is a dialect of ASL used by Black Americans in the United States, often more heavily in the Southern states. ASL and BASL diverged as a result of race-based school segregation. Because student populations were isolated from one another, the language strands evolved separately, to include linguistic variations in phonology, syntax, and vocabulary. BASL is often stigmatized when compared to “standard” ASL. The measurement of “standard signs” is particularly fraught, because it is based on signs used at Gallaudet University, a formerly segregated institution. The belief that one variant of a language is superior to others is called prescriptivism, and subscribers frequently conflate nonstandard usage with error. In the United States, progressive linguists argue that prescriptivism and prestige languages are tools for preserving existing hierarchies and power structures, with ties to Eurocentrism and white supremacist ideology.

This time around, True Biz’s audiobook woke me from a dead sleep. I’d made my peace with audiobooks of my books, conceptually, and had kind of forgotten about the eventuality of this one. But this novel presented a whole new existential problem: in the writing itself, I had worked hard to make use of space on the page as a way to highlight the strength and clarity of ASL as a visual language. The result was just a small token of appreciation for what ASL can do—I had still flattened a 3-D language to two—but the signed dialogue looks and feels different than spoken dialogue in the novel, and I had no clue how they’d be able to make that distinction for a listener. I sent a low-key panic email to my editor. She said she’d flag it as a “challenge” for the audio team. Here’s what they came up with: The audiobook team would record the book as usual, and then record a signer performing the ASL dialogue in the book. Very sensitive mics would pick up the sounds of signing—the skin-on-skin contact, the mouth morphemes, the rustling of clothes. The listener would learn that these sounds beneath the dialogue were to mean the character was speaking ASL rather than English. We can’t capture ASL in sound form but, like the use of space in the printed text, it’s a token. I appreciate that a hearing team put some thought into the project, and were paying enough attention to notice that neither signed languages nor deaf people are silent. So yesterday, I went to the studio, rigged up with two heavy duty mics. When I first got into the soundproof room and looked around, I started to laugh. It was mostly foreign territory, but there was also a trace of the audiologists’ booths all of us deaf and hard-of-hearing people have spent so much time in".

In her mother's version of things, love was always singular -- if not everlasting then at least in turn, with one love growing up from the place where another before it had died. Now Charlie sees that love can be plural, even concurrent.

This, she thought, much more than the filament in her head, must be what it was like to hear.

Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life when you were chasing the wrong dream. And after you’ve experienced that sustained fulfillment, you’ll never want to settle for anything less.

Hell yeah! Twitter was proof that leaderless self-organizing systems could be true agents of change.

This is true emergence, the wisdom of crowds—like flocking, it represents group members making choices together. The bigger message of the nomenclature evolution was exactly what I had been telling new Twitter employees. It was our job to pay attention, to look for patterns, and to be open to the idea that we didn’t have all the answers.

No, you didn’t invent Twitter,” Ev replied. “I didn’t invent Twitter either. Neither did Biz. People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.

This status thing could help connect people to those who weren’t there. It wasn’t just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at that moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less alone. It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens. An emotion that Noah and Jack and Biz and Ev had grown up feeling, finding solace in a monitor. An emotion that Noah felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness.

Before they knew it, Ev and Biz were getting sloppy drunk with the former vice president of the United States.

Hashtags are for nerds,” Biz replied. Ev added that they were “too harsh and no one is ever going to understand them.

The other thing I’ll say about money is that having a lot of it amplifies who you are. I have found this to be almost universally true. If you’re a nice person, and then you get money, you become a wonderful philanthropist. But if you’re an asshole, with lots of money you can afford to be more of an asshole: “Why isn’t my soda at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit?” You choose who you are no matter what, but I have to say that the anxiety of making ends meet gives you a bit of a pass. When you’re rich, you have no excuse.

Once true passion hits you, you can recognize all the times in your life you were chasing the wrong dream. And after you've experienced that sustained fulfillment, you'll never want to settle for anything less.

Though none of the encounters were pleasant, there had also been moments in which she felt powerful, to have something someone else wanted so intensely.

There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite. Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage. Once the window shut, learning anything became difficult, even impossible—without a language, how does one think, or even feel? The critical window remained “theoretical,” mostly because intentionally depriving children of language was deemed by ethicists too cruel an experiment to conduct. And yet, February saw the results of such trials every day—children whose parents had feared sign language would mark them, but who ended up marked by its absence. These children had never seen language as it really was, outside the speech therapist’s office, alive and rollicking, had never been privy to the chatter of the playground or around the dinner table.

It would be much scarier, even dangerous, to give birth in a place where no one knew sign language. The Deaf community was replete with hospital horror stories, particularly of the labor and delivery variety. Her mother’s friend Lu had been wheeled into the OR without anyone telling her that she was about to have a cesarean; a woman down in Lexington had died from a blood clot after nursing staff ignored the complaints of pain she’d scrawled on a napkin.

More than that, it had what February considered to be the most important indicator of good food - a 3:00 P.M. closing time. If they could make their living off only breakfast and sandwiches, safe bet it was going to be a good sandwich.

the True Biz policy as a way to get the students to talk to her when they were up to no good. The implication was that she’d soften their consequences if they told her about why they’d done whatever they had;

Sign language had been so thoroughly stigmatized that in trying to avoid it parents had unknowingly opted for a modern version of institutionalization, locking their children away in their own minds.

another that seemed to be a more emphatic version of “real talk,” and which was transliterated for her alternately as true business and true biz.

deaf president now Most of you have probably seen the phrase, but what do you know about the “Deaf President Now” movement? Despite being the first Deaf university in the world, Gallaudet had never had a Deaf president before, and in March 1988 that was finally about to change. The Board of Trustees was slated to choose the next president from a list of three finalist candidates, two Deaf, one hearing. In the lead-up to the board meeting, students and faculty had been campaigning and rallying in support of a Deaf president. THE CANDIDATES DR. ELIZABETH ZINSER, hearing, Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of North Carolina DR. HARVEY CORSON, Deaf, Superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf DR. I. KING JORDAN, Deaf, Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at Gallaudet On March 6th, the board selected Zinser. No announcement was made. Students found out only after visiting the school’s PR office to extract the information. Students marched to the Mayflower hotel to confront the Board. Chair Jane Spilman defended the selection to the crowd, reportedly saying, “deaf people can’t function in the hearing world.” WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 7TH: Students hot-wire buses to barricade campus gates, only allowing certain people on campus. Students meet with Board, no concessions made. Protesters march to the Capitol. MARCH 8TH: Students burn effigies, form a 16-member council of students, faculty, and staff to organize the movement. THE FOUR DEMANDS: Zinser’s resignation and the selection of a Deaf president Resignation of Jane Spilman A 51% Deaf majority on the Board of Trustees No reprisals against protesters WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 9TH: Movement grows, gains widespread national support. Protest is featured on ABC’s Nightline. MARCH 10TH: Jordan, who’d previously conceded to Zinser’s appointment, joins the protests, saying “the four demands are justified.” Protests receive endorsements from national unions and politicians. DEAF PRESIDENT NOW! MARCH 10TH: Zinser resigns. MARCH 11TH: 2,500 march on Capitol Hill, bearing a banner that says “We still have a dream.” MARCH 13: Spilman resigns, Jordan is announced president. Protesters receive no punishments, DPN is hailed as a success and one of the precursors to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES Phonological: BASL signers are more likely to produce two-handed signs, use an overall larger signing space, and tend to produce more signs on the lower half of the face. Syntactical: A higher incidence of syntactic repetition appears in multiple studies of BASL signers. A study documented in 2011 also showed more frequent use of constructed dialogue and constructed action among Black signers. Lexical Variation: Some signs developed at Black Deaf schools diverge completely from standard ASL signs, mostly for everyday objects and activities discussed frequently by students. Linguists have also noticed an increase in lexical borrowing of words and idioms from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) among younger Black signers. Due to the prevalence of the oral method in white deaf education after the Milan Conference, many white deaf children were denied access to American Sign Language, and ASL was subjugated by spoken English. However, significantly fewer resources were dedicated to Black deaf education, leaving many Black Deaf schools to pursue manual language. As such, scholars note that some variations common in BASL, like a higher incidence of two-handed signs, are actually a preservation of the linguistic qualities of early ASL. (Jump to “ASL, origins of.”) NOTABLE PEOPLE Platt H. Skinner, abolitionist and founder of The School for Colored Deaf Dumb and Blind Children, circa 1858. (Jump to “Directory of U.S. Black Deaf Schools.”) Carl Croneberg, a Swedish-American Deaf linguist, was the first person to note differences between ASL and BASL in writing, as coauthor of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on its Linguistic Principles (see also: William Stokoe). Dr. Carolyn McCaskill’s 2011 book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, features data from a series of studies performed by McCaskill and her team, and is considered a foundational work in the field.

figuratively speaking DID YOU KNOW? Like any language, ASL has idioms that, in context, can mean something different from the denotations of the signs and handshapes of which they are constructed. SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: train go sorry MEANING: missed the boat SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: many question marks MEANING: your guess is as good as mine no idea SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: closed small c or x handshape MEANING: cool SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: lump in throat MEANING: embarrassing cringeworthy SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: innocent plus MEANING: old-fashioned uptight square SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: finish touch MEANING: been there went have visited SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: swallow fish MEANING: gullible SIGN: ASL-ENGLISH GLOSS: true biz/true business MEANING: seriously literally deadass no kidding real talk

Eugenics was a popular pseudoscience at this time in the U.S., and Bell was a big advocate. The belief was used to justify the forcible sterilization of disabled people, a program that Hitler admired and is said to have learned from. Bell was against forced sterilization himself, but instead believed getting rid of sign language was the key to eradicating deafness. Without sign, deaf people would integrate into the general population rather than marry one another, thereby producing fewer deaf babies. Besides his ethics, Bell’s actual science was wrong—most deafness isn’t directly hereditary—but his ideas remain prevalent in deaf education circles today.

DELEGATES AT THE MILAN CONFERENCE IN 1880: HEARING DEAF 163 1 In 1880, educators gathered in Milan, Italy, to discuss the state of deaf education. The delegates had been handpicked by the oralist society sponsoring the conference with the express goal of eliminating manual language from schools. The conference passed eight resolutions, effectively banning signed language from schools for the deaf around the world for about 80 years. Some schools, including the school that would become Gallaudet University, pushed back against the resolutions, but most adopted them.

MILAN’S FIRST RESOLUTION: The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of articulation over signs in restoring the deaf-mute to society and giving him a fuller knowledge of language, declares that the oral method should be preferred to that of signs in education and the instruction of deaf-mutes. (Passed 160–4) MILAN’S SECOND RESOLUTION: The Convention, considering that the simultaneous use of articulation and signs has the disadvantage of injuring articulation and lip-reading and the precision of ideas, declares that the pure oral method should be preferred. (Passed 150–16) Where Milan’s resolutions were implemented, deaf children were forbidden from using sign language in the classroom or outside of it. As punishment, hands were tied down, rapped with rulers, or slammed in drawers. The period between 1880 and 1960 is considered the dark ages of deaf education. In the U.S., the National Association of the Deaf, founded in 1880 in response to the conference, became the first disability rights organization, and was and is run for and by Deaf people. Worried that ASL would become extinct, they also used brand-new film technology to document the language, making some of the earliest recordings of their kind.

MILAN’S LEGACY In the U.S., eugenics became unpopular after it was associated with Nazism. Subsequent deaf education conferences have apologized for the harm done by the Milan resolutions. Science has since proven ASL is a fully realized language, and that its use does not inhibit the learning of speech. Nevertheless, the shadow of eugenics persists in medicine and education today. The Alexander Graham Bell Association continues to advocate for the pure oral method of educating deaf children.

visual syntax and the art of storytelling When forming phrases or narratives in ASL, ask yourself: What order makes the most sense visually? If you were to draw the scene on paper, what would you set up first? Consider translating the sentence “The cup is on the table.” First establish your noun, then describe placement or action: First, the table: Then, the cup: Then the placement of the two together in space: There is some flexibility to word order. For example, some signers might introduce both nouns, “cup” and “table,” first, then describe them after. TEST YOURSELF: When thinking about visual grammar, why does it make sense to share information about the table before the cup? NOW YOU TRY! Tell your partner about your childhood bedroom.

It’s No One’s Fault: the mantra in their house. But no one believed it.—

Deaf

maybe standing for something wasn't always a choice

She would learn as much as she could and do whatever she could to dismantle all that she knew to be broken, brick by brick, by. hand if she had to. She would keep the bricks, though. She would use them to build something new.

No one is comforted by salad.

She cannot decide whether the heart's craving for opposites - not only from itself, but from the others it loves - is its greatest strength or biggest failing.

She cannot decide whether the heart's craving for opposites -- not only from itself, but from the others it loves -- is its greatest strength or biggest failing.

She cannot decide whether the heart’s craving for opposites—not only from itself, but from the others it loves—is its greatest strength or biggest failing.

There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite.

Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage.

At Jefferson High, even a small misstep could get you bullied for years. As far as she could tell they were still teasing some kid for a lethal fart he'd let fly back in sixth-grade gym class, so whatever you imagine a deaf-voiced cyborg girl caught, it was worse. The things that happened to girls always were.

But whether or not she banished the thoughts from her own head did little to help Emily, or any of the kids whose parents' affections were distributed on a sliding scale tethered to how well said kid could perform normalcy.

triple duty—nouns, verbs, and adverbs in asl DID YOU KNOW? The number or quality of repeated movements within a sign can mean the difference between a noun, verb, or adverb, or provide multiple kinds of information simultaneously. This grammatical feature means ASL is often more economical than spoken language. NOUN: Repeat the sign’s movement twice using a small range of motion. For example, the pointer and middle fingers are tapped against each other to make the sign “chair.” VERB: The sign’s movement is made only once, using a larger range of motion. Sometimes this movement is altered to more closely mirror the real-life action (see: “cup” → “drink”). Here the pointer and middle fingers of one hand are set on the other to make the verb “to sit.” Greater force and a stern facial expression can form the command “sit down.” ADVERB: Some signs can be imbued with descriptive information by tweaking or adding movement. For example, to add the information for a long period of time, a sign can be adjusted to incorporate a slow, circular motion (see: working, sitting). NOW YOU TRY! Using the base sign study, tell a partner about a time when you had to study hard or for a long time.

spelling doesn’t count THE ASL MANUAL ALPHABET: FINGERSPELLING DO’S AND DON’TS Use fingerspelling for proper nouns, like people, places, and brand names borrowed from English or other languages. Many people and places have sign names, too—introduce these words by spelling first, then signing. The signed name can be used thereafter. Use your dominant hand and try not to bounce. While reading fingerspelling, learn to look at the overall shape of the word instead of individual letters. Don’t conflate knowledge of the manual alphabet with fluency in ASL. Spelling is a very small part of any ASL interaction, and is used mainly for vocabulary borrowed from elsewhere. Don’t use fingerspelling as a shortcut back to English syntax or vocabulary. Try thinking of a synonym instead. DID YOU KNOW? Sign languages aren’t universal. They weren’t “invented” by any one person—instead they grew organically out of Deaf communities. They’re grammatically unrelated to spoken language, so countries that have the same spoken language may have different signed ones. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are very different—they even use different manual alphabets! ASL’s closest linguistic relative is French Sign Language (LSF) because of Deaf teacher and Frenchman Laurent Clerc’s role in founding the American School for the Deaf.

Isolation was a requirement of the implant, her doctor cautioned; she needed to be one hundred percent dependent on it to learn how to listen.

Most people hate their jobs, true, but my old man despised his in an Ahab-and-Moby (or Eminem-and-Moby) kinda way. He never said, “Go into the entertainment biz, son”—he was just a living example of why it was worth taking a shot going after the stuff of dreams rather than simply getting a job. I saw how much my dad hated working and realized he was right: Working blows. If you hate what you do, it’ll always be work.

A newcomer to the scam biz might suppose that scientists were the hardest to fool, but the opposite was true. Each letter after a name imparted a dose of misapplied confidence. PhDs believed that expertise in one field—say, neuroscience—made them generally smarter in all fields. Belief that one was hard to fool was the one quality shared by all suckers. And if the suckers wanted the results you were giving ’em—if they were already imagining the publications and fame that would come from proving psychic abilities were true?

Charlie was far from the she'd seen. She had language... all those years of energy poured into achieving the aesthetic of being educated rather than actually having learned anything.