Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
MAD
“mad”
How to make it
Hold a claw hand in front of your face and draw it toward you slightly as the fingers tense, with an angry face.
Grammar
An emotion sign with a blank face is incomplete — the brows and mouth carry the anger as much as the hand does.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The face screwing up in anger, shown by the hand clawing in front of it. Two hands make it ANGRY or FURIOUS.
Sources
- ASL-LEX (iconicity)Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova, Naomi Caselli, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, and Karen Emmorey. "The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 26, no. 2 (2021): 263–277. link
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Location
Nose
Made at the nose.
Movement
a tap
One-handed.
Palm facing in.