Not everybody who can't hear is culturally deaf, he says. People who grow old and lose their hearing may be deaf but they're not Deaf. Ditto for many people who grew up deaf but wore hearing aids or learned to lip read. Diane Larsen, who has been a lip reader since a bout of meningitis at age 4 and who now has a cochlear implant, says she has never considered herself culturally Deaf.

To be Deaf with a capital D means being part of a tight-knit community that values candidness and friendship and stretches across the United States and beyond. It also means being embroiled in culture wars about the education and future of deaf children and the future of Deaf culture itself.

Julio Diaz likes to tell this joke: A lumberjack goes into the forest to cut down a tree. He chops and chops, and when the tree is almost ready to fall he yells "Tim-ber!" But nothing happens. He chops a little bit more and yells "Tim-ber" again. Still nothing. So he goes to get a doctor, who comes back and examines the tree. Ah, says the doctor. The tree is Deaf. So the lumberjack signs "Timber!" in ASL. And the tree falls over.

American Sign Language, the joke suggests, is the best way to communicate with a Deaf tree or a Deaf person. That's Diaz's philosophy, too. Unlike his wife, who grew up in a family with eight deaf siblings and two deaf parents, Diaz grew up in Puerto Rico in a family that never learned to sign. At the dinner table, he says, he would just eat and leave, since he felt left out of the family conversation. At school, where he was expected to lip read, "so many things in class flew by me. I would ask what something meant and they would tell me how to say it, but that's not what I was after."

Lip reading, says Deaflympics snowboarder Jeff Pollock, who teaches ASL at the University of Utah, is difficult when the teacher's back is turned. Only 30 percent of speech happens with the lips anyway, "and the rest is just a guesswork," says Pollock, who spent his school years having "no idea what was going on."

It's a familiar story among Deaf adults who grew up in a strongly "oral" education system. Vealynn Jarvis, a Pleasant Grove hearing mother of a Deaf daughter who is now 35, remembers when Heather had her hands slapped for using ASL in school.

Like Diaz and Pollock, 90 percent of deaf children nationwide grow up in a hearing family. According to Annette Stewart, a clinical social worker at the Sanderson Community Center of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Taylorsville, 73 percent of those hearing parents don't learn to sign beyond superficial conversation.

Pollock says he feels closer to his Deaf friends than to his family, who never learned to sign. Wilding-Diaz says many of the Deaf friends she grew up with in Idaho — friends whose families were hearing — didn't even know what their parents did for a living.