It is quite clear from the reading that there has been a strong struggle for Stokoe to prove his view. It was not until the 1980s that we started to realize that sign Language operates in pretty much the same way spoken language does. Honestly, while reading I was really wondering why even a renowned man like Alexander Graham Bell deemed signed language as a vice that the deaf must avoid. More striking is that also the deaf shared the Oralists's views till they finally became aware of the illusion they had gotten into. Don't you think that we should sometimes stope for a moment and question some of our prejudices and things we have taken for granted. Moreover, Fox points out that "Human language has so strong a dsire for systematicity that in many cases a sign that enters the lexicon as an obvious mimetic gesture will change over time to become more arbitrary" (p. 105). So... if most gestures start out as iconic then with the course of time they change to become arbitrary, does that imply that Sign language is much less arbitrary than any spoken one? Can't we say that because humans tend to be systematic, they first produced, for a reason or another, this spoken word or that, then with time, people took the lexicon for granted and it became arbitrary?