Signing For Dummies (5 page)

Some
initializations
— concepts such as
a.m.
and
p.m.
— are signed as morning and evening, respectively, rather than fingerspelled. But a word like
okay
can be fingerspelled as O-K, or you can just show the F handshape.

Shaping up those hands

Remembering a few simple points can help you make
handshapes
like a lifelong Signer. Handshapes are hand formations used to sign each letter of the alphabet. In this section, we explain the basic conventions.

For Signing purposes, the hand you write with is called your
dominant hand
(some folks call it the
active hand
). The other hand is your
base hand
or
passive hand.
In this book, all of the illustrations represent a right-handed Signer. So the right hand illustrates the dominant hand, and the left hand illustrates the passive hand.

While the active hand does the work, the passive hand does one of the following:

Mimics the active hand

Mirrors the active hand

Displays one of seven basic handshapes, called
natural handshapes

The seven natural handshapes are the letters
A, B, C, S,
and
O
as well as the numbers
1
and
5.

Natural handshapes can be used in a variety of ways — the same handshape may move for a particular Sign but not another, or the same handshape may be formed in one direction for a particular Sign but formed in a different direction for another. For one Sign, such as
start,
the natural handshape (in this case, the number 5) forms in one direction. But in another Sign, such as
cook,
that same natural handshape is formed in a different direction. Check out the following examples of active/passive handshapes used while signing: