The Lost Sign Language of Sawmill Workers | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Sign Language of Sawmill Workers

atlasobscura.com

191 pointscurtis43 comments

This type of thing makes a lot of sense! My friend and I developed a small set of hand signals in a day while working on a project in the desert with high winds that made radios all but useless. We worked together all through the day always at about a distance of 150ft carefully taking linked measurements and barely used words. We also grew other types of standards, like specific things left on/in the ground at the various points so we could communicate enough information to make the measurements accurate.

We didn't develop any jokes or casual language, but I imagine if we had been out there for a few more days it would have happened pretty quickly.

You might consider contacting the author. I imagine that someone would be interested to hear the details of your signals.

Its truly amazing to me how many places come up with their own version of a language in day to day business. This is one of the extreme version, but I guess when you have to deal with horrible conditions for normal communication you make do.

I worked at place that used to have teletypes between locations and paid per letter. They developed a set of abbreviations that survived well into the e-mail era[1]. Every place at least has a lingo to explain specific concepts and procedures in the business.

This is one reason I am very interested in DSLs, dialects in languages like Red and REBOL, and speech acts in agent literature. It seems like a more natural fit with business to developer communication than API calls.

1) I wrote a perl program to translate at one point in some frustration.

I find it amazing too. At the moment, I'm totally into shorthand writing, i.e. the sets of symbols secretaries and other writing people had to come up with to be able to write faster with pen and paper back in the day.

It's just something really cool about a completely different "language" that's shared by a few people who'll know exactly why it's used and mostly learned out of necessity.

Hey, I did my MA thesis on Soeech Act Theory!

Do you agree with Searle's classification of speech acts into five different types? Or would you use a different way to classify them?

I find taxonomy useful, but I think Derrida is right that Searle was more preoccupied making SAT (and language in general) into a mathematical formula than the "art" of language. I think the only really crucial elements are: - locutions - illocution (act/force and [or vs] intent) - perlocution (act/force and [or vs] intent)

I find very little use teaching or using the 5 categories of Searle for interpretation of verbal or written speech acts.

I find studying a locution from illocutionary intent or perlocutionary intent more useful than Assertive, Directive, etc.

Hope it made sense and it was a useful answer! I still find it a fascinating field that is under-utilized because people try to make it into a programming language (a la Searle) instead of a way to understand semantics and semantic intent.

Thank you for your insights, this has been useful! (I was actually hoping to ask this to a linguist for some time now, so I was happy when I saw your message!)

You surmised my current situation well, I've been focusing a lot on the 5 categories and little on the locutions. I shall remedy that :)

One thing in your answer that I'm a bit fuzzy on is what you meant by the confusing thing in the brackets (act/force and [or vs] intent)?

>>>>"They could talk about their wives, cars, and colleagues. They could tell jokes and comment on what was going on around them without their bosses every knowing"

These mills were in the pacific northwest (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia). That isn't 18th century england with longstanding social classes. The "bosses" out west, the ones in the mills, weren't posh boys who never mixed with the workers. I cannot believe that supervisors and management wouldn't pick up on these signs very quickly and probably used them themselves.

Well, there's still the labor / management divide. I doubt they mixed socially, which is probably where the workers worked out the signs in detail, over beers. Also, the bosses weren't always out on the floor, especially the big bosses. They were in the office where it's quieter, so they had no reason to learn the language in order to do their jobs.

"Would you get Andrew into my office, please?" is a great way of not having to communicate on the noisy floor.

Yeah but everyone already knows what that one looks like. It's someone pointing at you and gesturing for you to get over there. Also if you're a supervisor in a sawmill, you probably don't ask someone working on the floor in a sawmill to go hunt someone down for you. You either do it yourself or send someone from the office to do it. The people on the floor have better shit to do.

Wariness and a generally circumspect attitude to what is revealed predominate in the relationships between workers and bosses in workplaces like that. At least, that's in my limited personal experience of working in factories, big post offices, that sort of place...it's more to do with capitalism than class I think.

Lumber mills are not like factories or big post offices. These things are in the woods, in remote locations, or at least in very small towns close to the trees. They are generally the biggest employer in the area by far. Everyone in town knows what goes on in the mill. They are all neighbours.

On the other hand, the recorded history of labor relations in the lumber industry.

In the weaving sheds and cotton mills of Lancashire, workers developed an exaggerated form of speech and gesture called mee-mawing to facilitate lip-reading.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=f6fQAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA37&lpg...

Looks like that book/page might be unavailable outside of the UK.

s/.co.uk/.com and you're good

Does anyone else get the sense that there is an increasing number of spelling errors and typos in otherwise excellent articles produced by otherwise excellent publications? Most are small and trivial, and exactly what would get past a spell-checker, but not a capable proof reader.

For example:

    > ... without their
    > bosses every knowing.
             ^^^^^

I'll have to start making a note of every article I read and see just how many do have such errors - it might just be selection bias.

They misidentify logs as lumber too. Lumber is the stuff that comes out of a saw mill, not the stuff that goes in.

(A mistake the source of the picture does not make).

It's just lean journalism. Release and iterate!

I see it's been fixed. Clearly a case of let your readers find your errors, just as some people release software and let their users find the bugs.

Typically the problem is that smaller publications don't have the luxury of hiring a copyeditor dedicated to catching these things. The economics of publishing require a certain volume, and generally it is hard to balance both the volume and the meticulous copyediting required to pass muster under an absurd rubric like this. Typos like ever --> every are nearly impossible to catch without a fine-tooth comb.

Been like that for 20 years, believe me. I gave up on calling/emailing, etc. to point out errors in normally high quality publications long ago. Now I'm impressed if I make it all the way through an article without a single grammar or spelling error.

Railroad workers have a sign language, but it's intended for use with lanterns at night and at considerable distances, so it's all big movements.[1] It's much reduced from what it used to be; the remaining signals are mostly "stop" and "go" level. But there used to be enough expressive power to say "cut off the the last three cars". This was how engine drivers and brakemen coordinated freight switching. Today, you'll still see simple hand signals, but anything complicated goes over two-way radios.

[1] http://www.rgusrail.com/manual/baker_fpi_1/baker_fpi_1.pdf

Not only is it lost potentially due to increased automation but also because we no longer process our forestry products locally, whole logs get shipped to China so we can buy them back in the form of various goods.

Pretty sad to see so many industries cut out at the knees so the forestry company makes a few extra bucks

I thought they just got exported 200 miles offshore to floating sawmills run by the Japanese?

The medium shapes/creates the language, in piraha language there are no words for numbers or colors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcOuBggle4Y

I dont think medium is the word you wanted. What is it about the "medium" (which I am assuming is 'air' since it is a spoken language) of piraha language that has shaped/created a language without numbers/colors despite the fact that english has colors and numbers?

Maybe if you think about the local environment (rainforest) as the medium in which the population is dispersed, like colloids :-)

Pirahã has several different channels, such as whistle speech, hum speech, musical speech, yell speech, &c. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003175.h...

The Pirahã also have an unusual counting system (none). http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001364.h... ...but this cuts against the argument that the medium very much influences the message.

I've heard the argument that some of these channels may be influenced by the jungle environment (whistled language elsewhere is frequently used outdoors because whistles carry farther). And I think whistled or musical speech is likelier to occur in tonal languages with a simple phonology (Pirahã's is very simple and very tonal). Dan Everett's claim was that a cultural avoidance of indirect references influenced the grammar of Pirahã (to put it crudely).

All of these "channels" are just different ways of making sounds. Call them whatever you want they still use the same medium.

I wonder if this type of nonverbal communication is still prevalent in the large, noisy factories and sweatshops of the developing world! This would be an incredible research project.

I learnt BSL (British Sign Language) with my then girlfriend whilst at uni. We used it to chat in the library, talk to each other across the room anywhere it was too busy or inappropriate to shout - very useful.

Given the access to information nowadays i imagine people would be more likely to learn an established sign language due to its wider use. That said we developed our own simplified signs for BSL to communicate with our babies, which quickly became adapted by them, so even this way I feel slangs would develop readily.

I once saw some people having a conversation between moving subway trains on different tracks. Awesome!

I worked in a printing press ten years ago, and all of the pressmen and binding-machine operators were deaf (congenitally, not from the equipment) and thus fluent in ASL. I'm not sure if management sought them out or if one guy got hired and started recommending his friends, but it worked out well. They could communicate with one another perfectly in places where even shouting was inaudible, and they often seemed to be better at communicating even with people who didn't know ASL just because they were so good at nonverbal communication.

It exists today in steel pipe mills in the US, where the noise is such it is impossible to hear a voice -- even shouted -- from further than a foot away. Radios are similarly useless due to background noise, so a catalog of hand gestures are used to communicate across the factory floor. It is almost impossible to communicate the wall of sound in one of these factories with words.

On a side note, I would be curious to learn if this improvised sign language is consistent between mills, or regions.)

In these same pipe mills I saw another curious method of communication which the employees referred to as "Mexican radio". (This was in south Texas where the preponderance of employees were Latino). The worker at one end of a 40-50 foot long pipe would put his ear to the end of the open pipe, and the worker at the other end would yell into the pipe. It worked surprisingly well (frankly better than yelling from a foot away into open air) but the safety officers weren't too keen on the idea as it put soft body parts (faces and ears) next to potentially razor-sharp pipe ends. Hand gestures were preferred and crossed any English/Spanish language barriers as well.

Related: There is a whistling language used by people who communicate long distances over a wide river valley. Can be heard at distances up to 5km!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero

Interesting article, thanks for sharing.

I also remember watching the documentary on trading on floor of the stock market and amazed in the hand signs used there as well. It even has a name, Open Outcry, but this includes shouting as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_outcry

The other one I'm reminded of is Tic-tac, the bookmakers' sign language that John McCririck helped to bring to popular attention on Channel 4 Racing in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac

Everybody should watch Ben's Mill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s

It has the most photogenic cows I've ever seen. It's an old documentary about a water mill powering a lumber operation.

This is how the industrial revolution began. Cogs and wheels!

This headline is such an invitation for a cruel "chopped off all fingers" joke.

Within the sport of surfing, some groups of friends might sometimes have their own small set of hand signs for communicating when verbal communication is not always possible out in the ocean.

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