Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
OLD
“old”
Close a 'C' into an 'S' hand as it moves down from the chin, as if drawing down a shape below the face.
A useful case study in how folk etymology spreads: a plausible-looking story gets copied text to text until it reads as fact.
Where the sign comes from
Folk etymology — correctedA widely-taught story that scholarship refutes.
The common story — and it's wrong: The hand strokes an old man's beard.
Nearly every American ASL text explains this sign as stroking an old man's long beard. That story is wrong. Historical dictionaries trace the form to gripping the top of a *cane* and the stooped posture of age. The beard reading is a folk etymology repeated for over a century.
- Shaw & Delaporte 2011Shaw, Emily, and Yves Delaporte. A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press, 2015 (research 2011). 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.
Starts as fingers curved into a c shape; ends as a fist with the thumb across the front.
Also: letter C
Moves from the chin to the neck.
One-handed.
Palm facing left.