No Pants O'Clock!

December 15, 2011 3:17 PM

Dirty Signs with Kristin is an informative YouTube channel that teaches you how to sign things you may need to use in day-to-day conversation, like cum dumpster, suck my cock, Trebek, nice shoes, wanna fuck?, it's like Christmas in my mouth, you have a sandy vagina, twat waffle, and many more (NSFW).
posted by Lutoslawski (33 comments total)

"The phrases I sign in these videos are things I mashed together from individual words I learned on the internet and from friends, and are probably not very close to the actual ASL phrases."
posted by vidur at 3:23 PM on December 15, 2011 [4 favorites]

I think I independently discovered some of these when I was talking to guys in bars during that summer in Italy.
posted by The Whelk at 3:32 PM on December 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

Gangstas Paradise in ASL, referred to in one of the videos
posted by Blasdelb at 3:34 PM on December 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

OK, I'm helping my friend who is an interpreter with studying for the math portion of the GRE tonight. I'm going to sign these things to her throughout the night and random times. It will be amazing, glorious, and weird. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
posted by King Bee at 3:34 PM on December 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

THIS IS SO VERY RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS! (Yes, even to the point of saying so in all caps.)
posted by scaryblackdeath at 3:34 PM on December 15, 2011

This post reminds me of Gallaudet girls at Nation in during the summer of '01. God bless all you ladies who dance because they *feel* rather than hear the music. You made me feel like I was missing a whole sense. God damn that was awesome.
posted by hal_c_on at 3:39 PM on December 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

My world is complete!
posted by greenhornet at 3:45 PM on December 15, 2011

I found out about Kristin from when Danielle Corsetto mentioned her a while back. There is this wonderful contrast with the nice helpful sounding person helping people sign dirty things, and her trying to keep a relatively straight face through the entire endeavor makes it even more adorable.
posted by mrzarquon at 3:52 PM on December 15, 2011

Weird, worst thing about hanging out with bros in they are alwasy talking about cum dumpsters and accusing me of having sand in my vagina. Better not show this to any of them or else I will have to deal with people signing "what do you have sand in your vagina?" every time I refuse to drink a jeager bomb.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:00 PM on December 15, 2011

This post reminds me of Gallaudet girls at Nation in during the summer of '01

Do we know each other? We probably do. Nation was my church.
posted by empath at 4:11 PM on December 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

These are adorable. Do we have any fluent ASL speakers on MeFi who can comment on how good her sign is?
posted by Nelson at 4:23 PM on December 15, 2011

I'm almost, ALMOST tempted to slip some of these into my ongoing quest to use ASL/"baby sign" with my son.

But then the white van would show up for me. Again.
posted by sonika at 4:28 PM on December 15, 2011 [5 favorites]

I'm going to take this opportunity to rep for Captain Valor - who is no longer doing ASL videos, but.

ASL JoCo
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:53 PM on December 15, 2011

Do we have any fluent ASL speakers on MeFi who can comment on how good her sign is?

Not very. These are not how I'd translate most of these expressions, and ... well, for example, that's not the word for "fuck" you'd use in "nice shoes, wanna fuck". It does refer to sex, but there's just not the right connotations for that phrase. On top of that, christ, her signing is so ... jerky and disconnected. The shapes are all a bit off. And I think she's switching which hand is dominant, which is kind of a no-no - sign left or right, don't switch back and forth.

More to the point, it's kinda disrespectful. I think you'll find a lot of Deaf people have been asked by hearing people, "hey, how do I sign [dirty words of various types]", and then it becomes a game; but there's no real attempt at learning the language. For a hearing person - and one who admittedly doesn't sign otherwise - to do this sort of thing is, at the very least, really awkward. On the other hand, if you wanted to learn some actually useful phrases - please, thank you, I think you're cute, what's your name - people tend to be a lot more open to that.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 4:59 PM on December 15, 2011 [13 favorites]

Another example: "Suck my cock, Trebek". That first sign she uses *means* suck my cock. Not suck. There's no reason to explicitly say "suck my cock". Really, "suck my cock, Trebek" is two signs: "SUCK-COCK" and fingerspelling "#TREBEK". *facepalm*
posted by spaceman_spiff at 5:03 PM on December 15, 2011 [4 favorites]

The sign for 'cock' sure does promise a lot. Also, she's so cute I want a plush doll modeled on her.
posted by benito.strauss at 5:03 PM on December 15, 2011

And who the hell signs cock that way never mind I'll be quiet now.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 5:06 PM on December 15, 2011

I laughed, because there was no closed-captioning on her videos.
posted by hincandenza at 5:16 PM on December 15, 2011

So, I took a community college ASL course, and this thing is all over the place with badness. I mean, I get the humor, but, eh.

Annyway, taking that class was really, really eye-opening for all kinds of reasons. I *highly* recommend you check out ASL courses in your area if you have the slightest opportunity. It's an amazing thing.
posted by odinsdream at 5:28 PM on December 15, 2011

wanted to learn some actually useful phrases - please, thank you, I think you're cute, what's your name - people tend to be a lot more open to that.

Oooh, ooh! I know how to say "Change my diaper!"
posted by sonika at 5:42 PM on December 15, 2011

JOEY [KENNY]
...and he wants to say that in the State of the Union. You know what my response would be? Me, too, but is this the first time you had that thought?

CHARLIE
Sign "union" again. That was cool.

Joey signs the word.

CHARLIE
No. It must have been a different word.

There's a West Wing quote for everything.
posted by ceribus peribus at 5:49 PM on December 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

she is trying and working on improving though...
posted by PinkMoose at 5:57 PM on December 15, 2011

PinkMoose: yes, and that's great! But to be disseminating information when your fluency is that weak, it's a little premature.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 6:11 PM on December 15, 2011

I love the post learning hurrays.
posted by chunking express at 6:17 PM on December 15, 2011

Jesus ... the FPP is NSFW.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:21 PM on December 15, 2011

Many players on the Oregon Ducks football team (#6 in the nation) take ASL to fulfill their foreign language requirement. Yeah, I know.

They discovered that the most popular fan sign for Oregon -- a two handed O made somewhat diamond-shaped by the natural way your hands lay -- is actually the ASL word "VAGINA."
posted by msalt at 12:08 AM on December 16, 2011

Hey, Leslie Knope has a sister!
posted by Pendragon at 12:51 AM on December 16, 2011 [2 favorites]

I thought that this was kinda cool until I read the disclaimer. Does she even know ASL?

ASL is a language - there are established ways that these phrases would be translated.

I think this is just rubbish. She has no idea and is just making shit up - anyone actually fluent in ASL would just think this is nonsense / you are an idiot.
posted by mary8nne at 3:33 AM on December 16, 2011

"I think this is just rubbish. She has no idea and is just making shit up - anyone actually fluent in ASL would just think this is nonsense / you are an idiot."

Yeah. This doesn't really help eradicate the widespread confusion that ASL is equivalent to signed English is equivalent to gestured equivalent of spoken words. None of those things are equivalent to each other and, in fact, ASL is not related to English (though it may have some borrowings).

Both ASL and French Sign come from an organically evolved signed language used by eighteenth century Paris street children, which was learned by the pioneering deaf educator, Charles-Michel de l'Épée. Prior to him, the deaf were thought to be mentally deficient and incapable of language. One of his students came to the US, which along with France was among the very first adopters of deaf education and the use of Sign, and this is how ASL and FSL are related. They are both descendants of an original French signed language and they are distinct from, and mutually unintelligible with, British Sign Language. ASL is not English.

We know from the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language, ISL, that a signed language can independently and spontaneously develop among a deaf community across two generations—the first generation will create a proto-language, a gestural means of communicating that is itself not quite a language; and then the second generation will, through their developmental period of language acquisition, "flesh out" the proto-language into a full human language. This happened with ISL in recent times, in the second half of the twentieth century, and is documented. It is a hugely important piece of evidence for linguistics. Anyway, we can safely speculate that the ancestor of ASL/FSL originated similarly.

ASL is a full human language in its own right and has its own grammar. It's as distinct from English as it could possibly be. So you can no more construct well-formed ASL expressions by transliteration of English than you could attempting the same thing with, say, Greek.

That said, there exists a widely-used transliteration of English into some ASL signs known as "signed English", and so these sorts of transliterations are more comprehensible in their own way than would be my Greek example because, basically, this transliteration is common. But it's not the same as ASL and that should be clearly understood.

I explain all this because it's my experience that people don't appreciate that signed languages are languages in the same sense that spoken languages are languages, and there is a tendency to make the kinds of mistakes we're seeing here that people would be more aware of with regard to spoken languages. Sure, people look up obscene/profane words in foreign dictionaries and attempt to use them; but I think that it's less common because people are far more likely to understand that it really doesn't work that way and doing this is very hit-or-miss...and even when it's more of a hit, it's still most likely very clumsy and not anything like how a native language user would express the same thing. Still, again, there is signed English, so there's more latitude with this sort of thing than there otherwise would be.

And while what spaceman_spiff writes above is absolutely true, it's also the case that in my personal experience Deaf people are not that shy about sharing signs for these sorts of words. My high school friends still tell stories about—and have vivid memories of this thirty years later—the naughty signs my deaf aunt taught them when we were in town on a band trip. They certainly remember the sign for fuck. (But it's pretty representational—though signs don't have to be. Remember that signed languages are not merely gestural communication and so representational characteristics should be thought of as similar to onomatopoeia in spoken languages, not as an essential characteristic of a signed language any more than onomatopoeia is essential to spoken languages.)

Just keep in mind that learning some of these signs doesn't mean you can actually curse in ASL any more than learning a few naughty words in any foreign language means you can actually curse in that language. Indeed, what is naughty in one language is not necessarily naughty in another, and therefore not necessarily the same functionally (in terms of "cursing"), because this is extremely culturally dependent. (In cultures that are very Catholic, for example, cursing tends strongly toward the profane, not obscene. The Québécois dialect of French is a good example of this.)
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:42 AM on December 16, 2011 [12 favorites]

It's entertaining, sure, but I agree she's more or less doing Pidgin Signed English. Word ordering in ASL is closer to Japanese than English except that the grammar allows for stacking of signs which vastly increases the information density of the language. This is a very important feature. Pidgin Signed English is typically slower than spoken English, whereas ASL is as fast or faster than English.

As a concrete example of this, I have a collection of ASL interpretations of Christmas carols. For one section of "We Three Kings", the interpreter signed (IIRC) "KING 3" then used the sign for '3' in place of 'person' for travel/journey and the was able to also express "slight wandering".

I wish I were fluent. When I encounter people who are deaf, I usually eavesdrop to the best of my ability and will introduce myself and apologize "sorry, sign kid-like". For the most part, my signing is like a young child - I don't know much, but probably a lot more than you suspect.
posted by plinth at 5:59 AM on December 16, 2011

Yeah. This doesn't really help eradicate the widespread confusion that ASL is equivalent to signed English is equivalent to gestured equivalent of spoken words. None of those things are equivalent to each other and, in fact, ASL is not related to English (though it may have some borrowings).

I get that there is a justifiable irritation in watching people who don't speak a language talk about how things are communicated in that language - as happens whenever someone asks how to translate something into Latin for a tattoo.

But ... she does specifically say:

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT an interpreter! I understand that the art of ASL is very complex, and what I do is much closer to "Signed English" as opposed to actual ASL. The phrases I sign in these videos are things I mashed together from individual words I learned on the internet and from friends, and are probably not very close to the actual ASL phrases. If you would like to start learning ASL, I highly recommend it--it's a beautiful language, and there are many good resources out there (myself not included). With that said, I am not trying to disrespect anyone in the process of making these videos, I'm simply trying to have fun with my friends. If you see me signing something incorrectly, PLEASE let me know, and I will make a new video. Thanks!

So, you know, there's a question about presentation here - why put signing on the Interwebs if you can't sign? - but she's explicitly not saying "here is how you say (x) in sign language" - at best she's using rude phrases as an aide-memoire for word-forms in ASL, and as a promotional tool for learning ASL more generally.

And I think she's switching which hand is dominant, which is kind of a no-no - sign left or right, don't switch back and forth.

Quite possible - but the tic-tac-toe tattoo on her upper arm also swaps sides in some videos, so it might just be that she is filming herself in a mirror sometimes, and performing directly into a camera at others.
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:15 AM on December 16, 2011

Ooh, ASL speakers upthread, what do you think of this?

(It's a signed performance of "Fuck You" by Cee-Lo Green that looks AWWWWWWWESOME, but I am hearing and don't really know from sign languages except for the little bits I pick up from being around interpreters.)
posted by clavicle at 12:59 PM on December 16, 2011

Try this version of Cee-Lo. It's much better. She does a couple of things that I associate as "hearing," but she got the concepts.
posted by Uniformitarianism Now! at 5:06 PM on December 17, 2011 [1 favorite]