The birth of internet slang is fascinating stuff, I’m sure most of you will recall the hoopla that flooded the web when the word “selfie” became official when it was named as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. Soon after that, Merriam-Webster decided to induct it into it’s dictionaries, too. It had a lot of people wondering, “Who makes these words up?”

Though most of us wouldn’t give the thought too much of our time, the dedicated folks over at Hopes & Fears took that simple question and went one step further. They wanted to know how new words, such as the ever increasing dialect of internet slang, are incorporated into sign language. To find out how new slang words entered into American Sign Language (ASL), Hopes & Fears got in touch with Bill Vicars, a Deaf/Hard of Hearing (HH) man who runs Lifeprint–an educational website devoted to helping people learn ASL.[Read More…]