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Although sign language, like any other language, will continue to evolve along with technology, that evolution must take place free from the impediments and myopic prejudices of the Kiev Nazis and their ideological Doppelgängers elsewhere.

Declan Hayes

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Although the traditional signs relating to women, such as ‘wife’ and ‘mother,’ which involved touching the lower half of the face, based on bonnets that girls once wore, and traditional signs relating to men, like ‘husband’ or ‘father,’ involved tipping the upper half of the face, emblematic of tipping one’s hat, are also under attack by these nutters, sign language, like any other language, must evolve naturally and without the inputs of Clown Prince Zelensky and his circus of sad and embittered losers, who also have words like ‘privilege’ in their sights because it traditionally referred only to ‘benefit,’ ‘gain,’ ’credit’ or ‘profit’ and so looked like putting a dollar into a shirt pocket, rather than referring to so-called white privilege or any of the other inventions of the Gender Studies crew, who obfuscate more important trends.

Imagine my horror discovering that American sign language equates Ireland to the potato. You don’t have to imagine at all as I find it hilarious, even though I understand the historical context as to how the Irish, rather than the Peruvians with their divine array of potatoes, or the Russians with their mastery of vodka, or indeed the good folk of Maine or Indiana who grow most of America’s potatoes, are synonymous with potatoes.

At least in American sign language. In Irish sign language, an Irishman is represented by a flat cap, which was very popular here until recently. In Japanese sign language, you showcase it in a different way.

Japan and the Japanese are important in this case as those who use sign language have their own wee networks the length and breadth of the world. If an Irish potato head hits the big smoke in Tokyo or New York, they will gravitate towards where their Japanese and American equivalents hang out and, of course, vice versa. Hit an Irish pub where the local deaf folk hang out and you will most likely find a Yank or a Japanese citizen in the thick of it, gabbering away with the rest of them at a mile to the minute.

All good stuff and all a credit to the many good people from France and elsewhere, who first developed this array of loosely connected languages. Whilst Irish sign language is a derivation of the original French version, the British and the Yanks, good folk like Sam and Ted Supalla, went largely on their own trajectories developing, as it were, their own idioms. And good on each and every one of them.

But before getting on to the main gripe of this article, let’s just say that sign language has to be taught unlike our own native tongues which we first learn literally at our mothers’ breasts, which is why mother, in its simplified forms, is the first word babies ever learn; it is the easiest for their nascent mouth muscles to pronounce.

Not so sign language, which the permanently offended have now targeted. Whereas some Irish with too much time on their hands might get offended by being linked to the potato (or to the flat cap), the former was very understandable in the context of America in the mid nineteenth century and I am happy to see them preserve the connection.

In contrast, some of our Jewish friends are outraged that Jews are represented in Flemish sign language by stroking the nose to identify Jews by virtue of their supposedly big noses. New Zealand, meanwhile, is in uproar because their variant represents Chinese people by tugging at the corner of the eye, Samoans by pressing down on the nose and male homosexuals by a hand-flop.

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