clusters

As you form word clouds and concept clouds that overlap so too you form clusters of sign clouds that arise from signs that fit their concept so perfectly that the hand configurations are used for a whole array of related ideas over and over this way and that way and reliably so for both doing and receiving.

"Popped up" is such sign in such a cluster that is used for the idea of "show up" and "appear" as appear on the scene.

Adele's song Someone Like You is a favorite for young interpreters who uploaded their versions, with the line "I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited but I couldn't stay away" and all of the interpreters without any exception chose this sign to convey the idea of turning up uninvited.

It is the opposite of "disappear," one of my favorite signs.

A sidebar please, Your Honor. This is unrelated to the cluster.

One day long ago Jeffery described an incident about encountering one of his teachers from the deaf school in Colorado Springs at the time, at an embarrassing place. I asked Jeff, "What happened then?" Jeff said, "peek around a corner, eye contact, disappear, leave" each sign connected to the next and run as a brief video. It contained the elements of cinematography, the actor's pov, the man dropping out of sight, the magic carpet ride out. Brilliant. I thought. In that moment Jeff changed the way I perceived his manner of speaking and my own manner changed on the spot. Finally, I got it. With Jeffery's help it sank in. With no actual sentence in there, he just showed by the most eloquently simple way possible what happened relying on these eminently useful signs.

Jeff used the kind of "leave" as depart, not the kind of leave like set a potted plant in place, and not the leaves of a tree or of books. It's as if an invisible man is standing on a carpet that is snatched up, and in Jeff's description the signs and motions are connected so "leave" starts at the spot where "disappear" ends.

You can leave in any direction you like. Back to the sign cluster and to the configuration and the concept attached to it that is so useful. 

Another kind of leave is "escape" from something such as a party or prison or classroom. In the same sense that you pop up or drop out you can also slip out or away.

When a group disappears and drops out of sight, it goes "extinct." 

That configuration being so useful for showing up, sliding out, and disappearing, as individual, as two, or as group, must not be discounted for other things too. It's just too useful a configuration as a horizon, a platform, the ground or a proscenium, what have have you. Here, instead of disappearing as a group under it, the fingers are run back and forth over it for the idea of "media," although the ideas of "movie" and "film" and "video" rely on another cloud-configuration while "print" and "newspaper" and "newsletter" and such rely on another. 

Videos from two impressively dedicated dictionaries, Signing Savvy and Handspeak.