Silence is Golden

My first wife, for reasons I never understood, was fluent in sign language for the deaf. When we met I thought it was a fairly useless skill, but it turned out I was wrong.

One day we were riding the subway in New York (at the time we both lived in New Jersey, not far from Manhattan) and a group of teenagers got on our train. They were hooting and hollering and making a lot of noise, though not speaking actual words. The reason became quickly obvious: they were deaf.

As they carried on and the people in the car looked at them, they began signing to each other about how stupid and ugly all of us were. They criticized what everyone else in the subway car was wearing, reading, doing, etc. I turned to my wife. "You know what they're saying, don't you?" She nodded.

We continued on, as they finally got around to commenting in sign language about us. We sat silently. Then we arrived at our stop.

As the train doors opened and we stood to walk out, my wife signed to them: "You're right, there are stupid people on this train. Guess who?"

The looks on their faces were priceless.