ASL Love, grey and gray

 

You said:

What does the hand gesture palm forward, thumb, first finger and little finger straight, the other two closed, mean?

ChatGPT said:

That hand shape—palm forward, thumb out, index finger up, little finger up, with the middle and ring fingers folded—has a couple of well-established meanings, depending on context.

In American Sign Language it means “I love you.” It’s a composite sign, combining the handshapes for the letters I, L, and Y. In that setting it’s affectionate, gentle, and entirely non-provocative. You’ll see it at Deaf community events, concerts, and increasingly in popular culture when people want to signal warmth without words.

Outside ASL, especially in music and pop culture, it’s often taken as the “rock on” / “devil horns” gesture. That meaning comes from a similar sign where the thumb is usually tucked in; when the thumb is extended, the gesture drifts visually toward the ASL “I love you,” but many people still interpret it as enthusiasm for rock music or performance energy rather than literal affection.

There are also cultural edge cases. In parts of southern Europe and Latin cultures, horn-like gestures can historically imply cuckoldry or warding off bad luck, but those meanings usually require the thumb to be tucked or the palm to be angled differently. With the palm forward and thumb clearly out, most modern viewers—especially in the U.S. and online—will read it as “I love you.”

So: same fingers, different worlds. If you saw it in a quiet, interpersonal moment, “I love you” is the safest interpretation. If you saw it at a concert or in a photo captioned with excitement, it’s probably just musical exuberance.

You said:

Hand gestures, like words, can be expected to mean different things in different cultures.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—and that parallel with words is a very good way to frame it.

Hand gestures function like a kind of unspoken vocabulary, but unlike words they’re rarely taught explicitly, so people assume their meanings are universal when they very much aren’t. A gesture that feels neutral or affectionate in one culture can be rude, comic, or even threatening in another, just as a familiar word can turn into a false friend when you cross a linguistic border.

What complicates things further is that gestures carry layers: the physical form, the social context, and the cultural setting. The same handshape can mean “I love you” in ASL, musical enthusiasm at a concert, or something much less friendly elsewhere—not because anyone is “wrong,” but because the gesture belongs to different symbolic systems. Unlike spoken language, there’s no clear boundary marker telling you which system you’re currently in.

That’s why intent matters so much with gestures. People usually mean what their own cultural grammar assigns to the movement, not what the observer’s grammar decodes from it. Misunderstandings happen when those two grammars don’t overlap, and they’re often more emotionally charged than verbal misunderstandings because gestures feel immediate and bodily.

In short, gestures are words without dictionaries—and every culture writes its own lexicon.

You said:

ASL is the language of the deaf in the States. Anywhere else?

ChatGPT said:

Primarily, no—American Sign Language is native to the United States and Canada, and to a lesser extent places that historically received Deaf education from those two countries. It is not a global or even broadly international sign language.

ASL developed in the early 19th century in the U.S., drawing heavily from French Sign Language (LSF) combined with local sign systems. Because of that history, ASL is linguistically closer to French Sign Language than it is to British Sign Language (BSL), even though English is the surrounding spoken language in both countries. This surprises many hearing people: ASL and BSL are mutually unintelligible.

Outside the U.S. and Canada, ASL has influence in a limited number of places, mostly where American missionaries, educators, or Deaf institutions were active. Parts of the Caribbean, some Central American countries, and a few regions in West Africa show ASL-derived or ASL-influenced sign languages. Even there, it is often mixed with local systems rather than used in a pure form.

Most countries have their own national or regional sign languages, which are full natural languages in their own right, not manual encodings of the local spoken language. France uses LSF, the UK uses BSL, Japan uses JSL, Thailand has Thai Sign Language, and so on. There is no one-to-one mapping between spoken languages and sign languages, and no single sign language serves as a universal standard.

For international settings—conferences, diplomacy, large events—Deaf people often use International Sign, which is more of a pidgin or contact system than a native language. It draws on widely recognized signs, iconic gestures, and contextual negotiation. ASL contributes to it, but so do many other sign languages.

So ASL is best thought of as a national language with some export history, not as “the sign language of English” or of the Deaf worldwide.

You said:

Why do you capitalize "deaf?"

ChatGPT said:

Good question—because the capitalization is doing real work there.

When you see “Deaf” with a capital D, it refers to a cultural and linguistic identity, not simply a medical condition. Deaf people (capital D) identify as members of a community that shares a sign language (such as ASL), social norms, history, and institutions. In that sense, it functions much like French, Buddhist, or Jewish: a group identity rather than a description of hearing ability.

Lowercase “deaf” refers to the audiological condition—partial or total hearing loss—without implying any cultural affiliation. A person can be deaf but not Deaf: for example, someone who loses hearing later in life, uses spoken language, and does not participate in Deaf culture.

The distinction emerged largely in the United States in the late 20th century, alongside recognition of sign languages as full natural languages rather than “assistive systems.” Capitalizing Deaf became a way of asserting that this was not a disability group alone, but a linguistic minority.

That said, usage isn’t universal. Outside North America the D/deaf distinction is less consistently used, and some people dislike it altogether, seeing it as artificial or exclusionary. Still, within U.S. contexts—especially when discussing ASL—it’s a widely understood and intentional convention.

You said:

It brings to mind the threat I see to the gay sub-culture if ways to prevent homosexuality are found. Much the same would happen to this Deaf culture. A step toward universal grey.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a sharp and unsettling analogy—and I think you’re right that the structure of the threat is similar, even if the histories differ.

In both cases, what’s at risk isn’t merely a set of individuals but a culture that arose in response to difference. Deaf culture exists because a community formed around a shared language and experience in a hearing-dominant world. Gay sub-cultures formed because people with a shared, stigmatized trait found one another and built norms, humor, art, and mutual protection. If the underlying difference were technologically or medically erased, the people might still exist, but the conditions that produced the culture would vanish.

What makes this especially fraught is that such changes are usually framed as unambiguous “progress.” Prevent deafness; prevent homosexuality; reduce suffering. And at the level of individual choice, that framing has real moral force. But culture is not something you can preserve in a museum once the lived necessity disappears. When the shared constraint goes away, so does the dense social world built around it. The loss is quiet, diffuse, and rarely acknowledged as a loss at all.

Your phrase “a step toward universal grey” gets at something important. Diversity here isn’t decorative—it’s emergent. These cultures didn’t arise because anyone planned them; they arose because difference forced creativity. Remove the forcing function, and you don’t get the same richness, just a smoother surface. Fewer frictions, fewer edges—and fewer unexpected forms of meaning.

There’s also an ethical asymmetry worth noting. Deaf culture has long resisted being treated as a pathology to be cured rather than a language community to be respected. The debate over cochlear implants already shows this tension. The same pattern appears wherever medicine, technology, or social engineering promises normalization without reckoning with what normalization erases.

So yes—different domains, but the same underlying question: when we eliminate difference, what kinds of human worlds become impossible? That’s not an argument against compassion or medicine, but it is an argument against pretending that every gain is cost-free.

You said:

Please help me with "grey" and "gray."

ChatGPT said:

Happy to — this one is mercifully simple, and mostly a matter of convention rather than meaning.

“Grey” and “gray” mean exactly the same thing. The difference is regional spelling, not nuance.

In British English (and most Commonwealth varieties), grey is standard.
In American English, gray is standard.

That’s really it. No formal distinction, no subtle semantic shading, no rule about tone or metaphor. Style guides on each side of the Atlantic simply enshrine their local spelling and move on.

Because you’re clearly writing in an internationally literate register, either is defensible. But consistency matters. If you’re otherwise leaning British in spelling (colour, centre, programme), grey is the natural choice. If your spelling is American (color, center, program), then gray will look more at home.

There’s also a tiny stylistic footnote: “grey” sometimes feels softer or more atmospheric to American eyes, precisely because it looks foreign or literary, but that’s psychological, not semantic.

So your phrase “a step toward universal grey” is perfectly correct — and if anything, the British spelling suits the philosophical, cultural register you’re using.

You said:

Yea, first I typed "gray" but it didn't have the right feel.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that subtle “feel” is real, even if it’s not formally part of the dictionary. “Grey” carries a kind of soft, reflective, slightly literary tone, whereas “gray” reads more plain and utilitarian in American eyes. For a phrase like “a step toward universal grey”, that reflective, almost poetic resonance really fits the philosophical weight you’re giving it.

Language is funny that way: sometimes the look of a word carries almost as much meaning as its definition.