Good Read....

Well - I have finally been doing it! I have read four books in the past two months. Now this may sound like a lot or a little depending on who you are and your reading style. Before triplets, I used to "eat" books - a 3/4 books a week kind of person. One of the biggest downsides of motherhood for me has been the "Mommy brain". I don't know if this has to do with hormone levels or sleep deprivation or the need to be ever vigilant and notice details about your babies to keep them alive and safe but for the longest time (well over a year) I couldn't read more than the directions on a baby Tylenol box. I knew this was a serious problem when we got two cars when we moved here (a Honda Oddessey and a used Mercedes ) and I did not read the manuals before driving them. This was one of the things that I used to do - the result was that it took me over 15 minutes to figure out how to turn on the lights the first time I had to pick Steve up at the train station after dark.

Anyway, back to the point of this post - I just read Talking Hands by Margalit Fox. (http://www.talkinghandsbook.com/) It is a wonderful wonderful book. In my pre-Mommie days, I was a linguistic anthropologist but I was never overly interested in sign language. Yes, I knew that a lot of data about human language ability came from such studies but it just never really interested me. I wish I had this book when I was teaching intro to Linguistics. Fox, a journalist with degrees in Linguistics, tells a story of her visit to a Bedouin town in Israel where everyone - both deaf and hearing - signs a local sign language that is 70? years old. She tags along with a team of researchers who are documenting and studying this langauge. The book's chapters alternate between the story of her visit and the context of why what is being studied is significant. It covers all the major points of an introductory linguistics class - not in detail but at a high enough level that the reader can understand why such things are studied. If I ever teach that again, I have to remember to use this book. The main did-you-know-s I got out of this are:
1- There was a local signing community on Martha's Vineyard through the early part of the 20th century
2- Deaf people can get Broca's or Wernicke's aphasia in the same way that hearing people do save it is with their signs
3- I have to research this - in ASL, there are two categories of transportation, one for airplanes and one for everything else. So, is the Space Shuttle a kind of airplane? Or is it something else?

It was a great read. I felt like my brain was working again and all the topics that I used to love came back to me.