The nature and status of American Sign Language
(ASL), although long settled as linguistic matters (see Hoffmeister 2008;
Liddell 1980, 2003; Lillo-Martin 1991; Lucas 1990; Neidle et al. 2000;
Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006; Valli, Lucas, and Mulrooney 2005), remain popular topics subject to serious misunderstandings and misrepresentations among nonlinguists, as the opening epigraph demonstrates. As Ronald Wardhaugh has noted about language in general:
Language plays an important role in the lives of all of us and is our most distinctive human possession. We might expect, therefore, to be well-informed about it. The truth is we are not. Many statements we believe to be true about language are likely as not false. Many of the questions we concern ourselves with are either unanswerable and therefore not really worth asking or betray a serious misunderstanding of the nature of language. Most of us have learned many things about language from others, but generally the wrong things. (1999, viii)