brown beer, bitch

This idea came up a while ago after hearing an ad on t.v. featuring Rolling Stone's song Paint it Black. Believe it or not I hadn't heard the song before. Looking into it I cannot see how I managed to miss it. I know how, but it still seems impossible.

I want to get the files off the laptop.

I liked the song immediately. I thought it was new. How stupid. After discovering how wrong I was, how slow on the uptake, how far behind everybody else, now that I know what it is about, I checked to see what the kids did with the song in ASL, as my wont. The song has been covered several times.

This interpretation is the best. After watching a few times I concluded, these two interpreters were asked by a third party to participate due to their known skills and not by one of them particularly taken by the song. They too are seeing the lyrics printed for the first time. Somebody requested, "please sit down and show us how you would say this." And they kindly obliged.

I like this song for its strange and powerful visual imagery, perfect for this sort of thing. The singer is talking about a funeral. The singer's impression of a funeral and the affect the death has on the singer.

Two items at the beginning of the song are worth pointing out, and one of items serves as example that will support my 'brown beer, bitch' pitch.

If you care to, look at how each translator handles the phrases at the beginning,  "line of cars" and "dressed in their summer clothes."

The video must be viewed on YouTube.

Both male and female show how to say the word "black," an index finger pulled across both eyebrows as if drawing a thick unibrow. 

The sign for summer is similar, an index finger, sometimes curled, pulled across the forehead. The original version, I was taught several decades ago, flicks sweat off the finger after the forehead swipe, so, a two-motion sign, wipe, flick, but who does that? Flick sweat. The final flick is abandoned. 

Very similar signs. For black you MUST pull a line across the eyebrows, for summer you MUST pull across the forehead, it is the only difference between them. In the hands of some signers, there is no difference between them.

The male signer makes no distinction between "black" and "summer." Unfortunate. Both words appear in the same song. That is his one flaw right off the bat. He has the girls walking by wearing "black" dresses and not wearing  "summer" dresses and it makes a big difference in the visual imagery forming in a viewer's mind. (Although admittedly it makes no difference in a song about a funeral. It's just a notable incongruity within the song.) 

See, the cars and the dresses and the door really should have been black, but they weren't, so paint them. Black, to fit the mood the singer feels. That is what must be conveyed, and I am not seeing it. I am not seeing pictured in air the essential idea of the song. 

Worse, there are a lot of signs with this motion of a finger or a flat hand drawn across the face, under the chin, over the chin, across the lips, under the nose, across the nose, across the eyes, across the top of the head, all meaning different things, for "ugly," "dry," "forget," "because," "better" for example, I can show them all but it would be a long list of such animated gifs or short videos. The point here is there is a clear difference between "black" and "summer," that must be shown no matter how similar, they are still distinct.

The female interpreter is reading the lyrics "I see a line of cars and I want them painted black" and she signs "line of cars" eloquently as if she were speaking to a friend who knows her intimately and what she is on about, as if a single vehicle (unspecified) is drawing a line. She uses "vehicle" to draw a line on the table. It is a sweet way to abbreviate that phrase but it looks exactly like a single car is skidding on a flat slick surface and not like a row of individual parked cars lined up. She make a pun on "line."  Had she been given time to prepare, even time to read the lyrics first to see what is going on, then she could have drawn a more appropriate air-pictue, she would know the visual imagery of a line of cars is called for, parked there for a funeral. They should be painted black. The male does better with this conveying the visual imagery the song is conveying.

How are cars painted? 

With spray paint. That is different from the regular sign for paint. Look how slaphappy the sign for "paint" is. 

The best interpretation would be use the male's version of a row of cars, and spray paint the whole row in time with the music. However the cars are painted, with spray as they would be, or slapped on with a broad exterior house painting brush as sign convention has "paint"  we do need to see the whole row of cars parked in a line being painted. That is what the song is saying. The mood is black, the cars should be black. Neither of the translators does this. The female skips "painted" altogether, she just wants the cars black. She skips the whole idea of painting. If you do not see this flappy sign then you do not see something being painted, a red door, a row of cars, whatever, Unless, of course, you see spray paint. 

Another non-song example might be useful for describing the need to distinguish between similarities or be lost. The sign for "brown" is a "B" but so is the sign for "blue." The blue "B" is shaken comfortably at pectoral height, and the brown "B" is lifted to the cheek and drawn down. 

I have no idea why that is "brown." Sometimes you just have to accept convention. It is similar to the word for "beer" except beer does make sense, it is beer foam dribbling down the side of a beer-drinker's mouth. 

As if that happens.

The sign for brown starts up higher and slides down further, but that is up to how individuals sign them. There IS a difference between signs, but it is minor. In sign, brown and beer go together.

If the "B" is sort of chopped at the cheek, or chopped straight toward the lips then the word becomes "bitch."  Some people make no distinction between these three signs.

If the "B" hatchets the whole face then the word is "bastard." But the word for "bitch" has to start somewhere and be brought up to the face to begin, and the setup for "bitch" looks like the word for "bastard," in effect, out at large, there is no difference between them.

If the "B" originates from the lips (but it must be brought to the lips first!) then the word is  "be." Strangely, all of the "to be" verbs that are so essential in all other languages are nearly useless in this language because all this motion is already in a state of being. Being is inherent to movement. This sign is useful for people coming to ASL from English. We need the "to be" verbs, they do not. At any rate, the sign "be"  looks like bitch and bastard. 

Now, after all that, given similarities between signs, and given variances in personal style, how important it is that each individual make a distinction between them or else risk having none of it straight.