You say one who is technically hard of hearing but cannot use the phone would be considered deaf. Howver, what about the reverse? I know some people with 90-95 db hearing losses who just happen to hear very well with hearing aids and use the phone. Would they be considered hard of hearing because they can use the telephone?

I’d also like to add that I’ve been skimming comments, and I apologize if I’ve missed something in your reply that would lead me to the answer.

What you tend to see is an image that born-deaf, sign using, deaf school, and cultural deaf people are at the top of the ‘tree’, and the rest viewed as wannabees or aspiring to that. The only ID I carry around is me as an individual. I don’t let deafness dictate who I am, or let others do it. It would appear that America is emulating the class system the UK was well-known for ! Take it from us here in the UK, it isn’t nice… you won’t like what it does. it creates envy, and an elite. Are deaf people just poking fun at the system ? pretending to invent categories to wind them up and confuse them ? because few deaf I know pay any attention to them !

Thanks for the gentle reminder and your other thoughtful comments. A question for you - can you explain the comment about gentiles and 1919? At first I thought this was an oblique reference to the Balfour Declaration, but that was 1917 and doesn’t quite fit your meaning.

How much hearing loss do you have? Can you answer and
talk on the phone? If you answer “yes” to the latter,
I would call you “hard-of-hearing.” No one in the deaf-hard-of-hearing community considers HH as a dehumanised
term. (Yes, a people in the Middle East would regard
it as one of the most unpreferred gene and should you
marry to a deaf person, you would be looked down at as a gentile before 1919.)

Senso Comune (my personal definition):
Decibels of deafness are widely varying in degrees.
My personal definition of deaf people and hard-of-hearing people is that whereas the former cannot answer the phone, unaided, some of the latter can answer and talk on the phone. Very matter-of-factly, some of the latter cannot talk on the phone. They are
the ones whom I would move into the Deaf category.

Albeit varying labels at home — ranging from
totally deaf (mother); severely deaf (father);
moderately deaf (sister); profoundly deaf (myself),
all of us identify ourselves as Deaf when in public.
It would be quite taxing to use an adverb to modify
the adjective, “deaf,” n’est-ce pas?

NAD serves deaf people of varying deciBels. AGBell
used to call its organisation “AGB Assocaition for
the Deaf” for more than 75 years. Recently, it has
changed to AGBADHH. Why? Because some hard-of-hearing people object to being labelled as “deaf”.