Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author
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| < previous page page_59 next page > Page Bill and Ruth Stokoe had grown to like Washington, DC. Within months of their arrival they became members of the St. Andrew's Society of Washington, where Bill played the bagpipes. They joined the society's Scottish country dance group and attended the St. Andrew's Day ball each November. Some members of the society became their lifelong friends. But the summers in Washington were another matter. The Stokoes found the heat and humidity disagreeable, especially since they both came from upstate New York where the days were cool and the evenings were, as Bill says, 'downright cold sometimesgood sleeping weather" 1 The Stokoes welcomed the opportunity to leave Washington during the summer of 1957 so that Bill could attend the Buffalo linguistics seminar. They would enjoy staying with relatives, and Bill would be doing what he loved to dostudying and conversing with other intellectuals. Stokoe writes enthusiastically about that summer, which was, in many ways, one of the best times of his life. Amazingly, for six weeks I would be in the company of the two men whose description of English had become a major focus of one part of my 195 3-54 sabbatical study. It seemed too good to be true I'd get a subsidy for what I was longing to do. In his first lecture, Haxie Smith defined the subject matter by looking quickly over the subjects of physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. The focus of our attention was to be culture, something none of the above investigated, and within culture, one of its ten major message systems called language. I had seldom been in the presence of a more inspiring teacher. Besides the knowledge of how to analyze and describe an exotic language, I learned that in normal human interaction the information exchanged was preponderantly in the communication systems "surrounding" language. These systems, which Smith and Trager and Birdwhistle called paralanguage and kinesics (the one to be heard, the other seen, accounted for all but a fraction of what passed back and forth in face-to-face interaction. Our subjectlanguagewas by comparison a minor channel for information. I learned also that lan- Download 2.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
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