BSL notes

I'm doing an eleven-week beginners' BSL course with me_and; in lesson #1 we covered fingerspelling, a brief conceptual overview of BSL grammar and BSL as distinct from sign-supported English, and asking people's names. Homework was to practice finger-spelling three- and four-letter words slowly, correctly, and steadily, to get used to moving our hands while making correct mouth-shapes/facial expressions. Particular notes to remember: move vowel fingers forward not backward while finger-spelling (faster!); don't bother linking little fingers for s (ditto).

This week we moved onto a pile of vocabulary.

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Homework: practice making small sentences with all of these; get words I missed (because lungs) off A.

eta lnr provides an online BSL dictionary (if somewhat patchy nonetheless a resource!)

Hello UK folk

I've put together a petition requesting that government bodies include a non-specific gender-neutral honorific such as Mx in all preset lists of titles. I'll be very grateful if you sign & signal-boost.

The very short explanation is that I think it's ridiculous to have a list that includes "Wing Commander" but not "Mx" (as is the case when using the fill-in-on-a-computer version of the ESA application form).

The slightly longer version is that applying for benefits etc ends up with me being misgendered a lot, which is rather uncomfortable, and last week ended up with me being addressed by my grandmother's name (I am not Mrs B. My mother is not Mrs B. That's... very much my deceased grandmother, thanks.) On top of that, a lot of places -- including banks -- make the (completely spurious) claim that they can't offer Mx as a title because HMRC doesn't: if the government can be persuaded to set an example, a whole lot of other institutions and organisations are suddenly going to have to fall into line.

(Last week I realised, slightly to my astonishment, that I hadn't seen this done; and a trawl of petitions.parliament.uk didn't show anything up. So here we are.)