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Page just kept on pursuing his interest, thank God, and didn't let us get him down. Of course, I didn't know him intimately at the time, so I don't know what his true feelings were. On the outside he didn't seem any different, but on the inside It must have hurt, but he never showed it, never even rebutted the criticism as far as I am aware. 37
Stokoe did rebut the criticism, but in his own way, by proving in the end that he was right. As Robbin Battison explains "He is one stubborn son of a bitch, and he sticks up for principles. I've never seen him back down from anything, I really never have.
Gentle as he is, he sticks up for things he believes in and doesn't back down. It's kind of an interesting set of near contradictions,
but that's Bill."38
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Page Chapter 5
The Dictionary of American Sign Language . . . brought official and public recognition of a deeper aspect of Deaf people's
lives: their culture.
CAROL PADDEN
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Page Although Bill Stokoe had no training as a linguist, within six months of the publication of Sign Language Structure he was invited to join the Washington Linguistics Club and to deliver an address there. 'My pleasure in being here and my interest in getting to know all of you" he told the audience, "can perhaps best be measured by my temerity in accepting an invitation to meet you, to join you, and to speak to you, all on the same occasion" Hundreds of speeches, workshops, articles, and essays followed during the next thirty-five years as Stokoe's reputation spread throughout the United States and Europe. He soon stopped apologizing for his "temerity"he had started a scientific revolution,
and recognition of his achievement in the form of invitations poured in from the linguistic community. Gordon Hewes, an anthropologist noted for his research on the origins of human language, observed that "before Bill's work was published, few if any linguists or others considered ASL or any sign language as more than a crude derivative of spoken language, often ill-suited to intellectual communication. Most of the well-known linguists of the world regularly dismissed sign language systems as having little scientific significance. That they were useful for the profoundly deaf was acknowledged, but only as a substitute for 'real language' (i.e., speech)."2
Stokoe had developed anew paradigm through which to view American Sign Language. While linguists embraced his findings and delighted in discussing their merits and applications, many people at Gallaudet and in the larger deaf-education community experienced the "period of pronounced professional insecurity" noted by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions.3
And that's putting it nicely. As prophesied by Dennis Cokely, a linguist who later worked with Stokoe at Gallaudet, Stokoe's work eventually undermined the "significant control" hearing people had gained over the lives of the deaf from the time oralism was introduced in this country As long as ASL was considered nothing more than a collection of primitive ideographic gestures, hearing people's superior role as the users and teachers of areal" language was not questioned. These teachers, Stokoe observed, "had determined that there was

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