We had the ASL Missionaries over (LDS) for dinner the other night and my husband had just been studying gorilla’s in Anthropology.  He went on and on about Koko the Gorilla who had been taught ASL.  He kept wondering if the gorilla really did learn ASL or if she was just responding the way that she knew her handlers wanted her to.   He discussed this with the deaf missionary and ended with ” If I was deaf, I would wonder if Koko could really understand ASL.”  And that’s when I had to tell my husband the horrible truth:  “You ARE deaf.”

The deaf call that ‘hearing in your head’ and it can be really useful in a hearing world that is full of puns and jokes that only translate if you understand the similarities in the words and the phrases.  My husband can understand the joke because he was…