Wrong “HEADLIGHTS”!

It’s never a dull night at my ASL class!  Our teacher Mary was back from vacation, and had another set of her famous strips of paper.  This time, they were all about describing car problems.  Mary had us stand up in front of the class and describe the problem, and the rest of the class pretended to be “expert mechanics.”  The problems contained a lot of words we didn’t know the signs for, or are just fingerspelled, like ALTERNATOR and BREAKS.  Instead of just fingerspelling them, though, she wanted us to act them out.

My first scenario was, “Your car has a leak somewhere; when it rains, the car floods behind the driver’s seat.”  I didn’t know how to sign LEAK or FLOOD, so I fingerspelled “leak” and tried to act out drips of water falling off my left hand.  For “flood,” I signed WATER and showed it rising up from the ground.  As it turns out, that is the real sign for FLOOD, so I was very excited that I’d figured it out. 

Then my classmate Jessica got up to describe her problem:  the headlights of her car were getting dim.  We had learned the sign for HEADLIGHTS back in Level 2—basically it’s just holding both hands in front of the chest and opening them, to signify the beams of light.  When Jessica sat down, Mary said, “Ok, this is why I have you get up and practice your signing in front of the class; to avoid situations like this where you might embarrass yourself.”  I thought back to what Jessica had signed, wondering what she could have possibly signed accidentally.  She seemed to do a great job, so I couldn’t think of what bodily function or “dirty word” she might have signed.  Mary stood up and demonstrated HEADLIGHTS the way Jessica had signed it, right in front of her chest.  “Ok, what’s wrong with this sign?” she asked us.  We all looked around at each other and shrugged.  “Isn’t that how you sign it?” I asked her.  “Well, if you do it right here, in front of your chest, it looks like you’re talking about a different kind of headlights, if you get my drift,” Mary explained.  We all burst out laughing; Jessica, slightly embarrassed, joked “I’m quite proud of my set of headlights, thank you very much!”

I asked Mary, “So, where do you suggest we place our CAR headlights, then?”  She stood up again and demonstrated.  “I’d put them at about waist-level, that way there’s no confusion about which HEADLIGHTS you’re talking about.”  My second scenario was that one of the headlights on my car had gone out, so I was extra-careful when signing that my HEADLIGHTS were down in front of my waist.

When I got home, I looked up the sign for HEADLIGHTS in my ASL dictionary.  It says to place the hands “in front of the chest,” and the illustration shows it just the way Jessica had signed it.  The model for the illustration is a man, though, and I wonder if they didn’t use a woman on purpose…