American Sign Language--the Evil Eye

Lone Sign

by Ken Boyd

The American Sign Language, better known as ASL, is a language utilized by the deaf community that consists of body language and hand gestures to communicate with those both inside and, at times, outside of the deaf community. It is, in essence, its own language with grammatical structure—just like any spoken language.

What the hell does this have to do with Dio? I hear you asking with an ever growing level of consumed bandwidth. Well, hold on to your cyber shorts and I’ll explain. And you might just pick up some interesting information along the way.

ASL—established in America c.1817 by Laurent Clerc and Thomas Gallaudet—has its own morphology (what linguists term the rules for the creation of words in a language) that utilizes hand signs in addition to their gestures that were developed by a method called Signed Exact English (SEE). They consist of 24 gestures made with a single hand—each representative of a letter of the Alphabet. This is called “Finger Spelling” Each of these signs could be put into a succession to spell a word—but could you imagine trying to finger spell MISSISSIPPI?! Finger spelling is often only made use of with a person’s name, a location, or something not represented by the gestures more commonly used.

The first of these is called a sign gesture. It is a representation of a word—or even an entire idea (much like in the Japanese language). Some are very mime like and easy to decode to those not versed in sign, while others can be complex and seem to have little meaning to a hearing person.

The second is known as a “Lone Sign”. This is a combination of finger spelled letters to form a word. An example might be by putting all three letters of “D”, “O”, and “G” together into a single sign gesture for  DOG. Again, remember trying to finger spell MISSISSIPPI? Obviously this cannot be used on a word like the state, but it is very ideal for short two, three or four letter words.

The “O” is the folding of all four fingers to meet the thumb and forming a circular shape—like showing someone a “ZERO”. There are pictures below on how it is actually done...go ahead try it, no one is watching.

The “D” is done in the same manner as the “O” with the exception that you lift the index finger to point straight up in the air. Come on, now! Give a try too—you may find you do this all the time without even realizing it.

The “I”, likewise, is done in the same manner again as the “O” excepting that the pinky finger is extended to point in a straight upward direction. Yeah, this is the last one, promise...er, until we put them all together that is!

So what happens when we put these all together?

First off we have formed a new Lone Sign that spells “DIO”—c’mon, put those puppies together! And there we have the EVIL EYE sign! So you are actually shouting DIO in sign whenever you throw the evil eye into the air!! Cool, huh?

Now, obviously I don’t think this was planned, it is simply a coincidence—but one I thought you might find of interest.

For more information on the hearing impaired or the deaf community please write to:

Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Ave N.E. Washington DC 20002 USA