‘You’ll have to speak louder,” I remember saying to a nurse about my father. “He is quite deaf.” My father looked up, annoyed. “Hard of hearing,” he said.

He was over 90, and in the hospital with congestive heart failure. His hearing loss had gradually deprived him of the kinds of conversation he enjoyed, subtle, witty, full of complex allusions. The word deaf, he felt, carried a stigma. He had hearing aids, but didn’t like them. His shaky hands made it hard to handle their fiddly batteries.

There can be a genetic component to hearing loss, so the deafness I’ve experienced for the past decade likely comes from my father’s side. Hearing loss is a complex fate, altering social encounters and practical transactions.

I first became aware of it while riding in the back seat of a car, where I was unable to follow the conversation taking place in the front. Next was in a college class I was auditing. There I might have been able to blame the mumbling of college-age students, except that the 30ish professor had no trouble hearing them.

Hearing loss makes a bad combination with indoor tennis. The high open space is boomy, and except for the most obvious communications — “Out!” or “Let!” or “Yours!” — I am at a loss for conversation until we meet at the net. It is not fun to keep asking people to repeat, even when I know I’ve missed a joke. As another tennis player with hearing loss remarked: “We smile a lot.”

Both my husband and I wear hearing aids. I put mine on first thing in the morning, as the experts recommend, the rationale being that the brain does better when you hear. He wears them only when he feels like it, often spending many hours a day unamplified.

A frequent question from both of us when we’re not being heard is, “Do you have your ears on?” The trick is not to be annoyed as you ask this question. Deafness does not have to go with irritability, but it’s easy to let it go in that direction.

The new small, almost invisible hearing aids sometimes elicit a comment of “Oh, how nice for you, I didn’t even notice.” I guess that’s a good thing, but I resist feeling pleased, since it’s not my intention to conceal them. I like them because they work. I would rather someone knew I had a problem so they’d understand why I can’t hear them when they are walking in front of me. Mask-wearing has been a particular nuisance, making me realize how much I depend on lip-reading.

Like other disabilities, deafness is not funny. Still, I can remember as a kid hearing jokes about deaf people, about funny mis-hearings. The jokes were likely told by my father, a man who knew and enjoyed telling jokes. There was no sense at the time that this was inappropriate or insulting to deaf people.

The funniest literary account of deafness that I know is David Lodge’s book, “Deaf Sentence” (get it?). Lodge, who has been there as a person with hearing loss, describes the physiological changes that account for deafness and the kinds of resulting verbal confusions — rhymes from missing initial consonants: pump for bump, handle for candle. Meanwhile, his hero suffers from a variety of misunderstandings, the most significant producing an assignation with a young woman following a loud party where he has unwittingly, unhearingly nodded his assent.

I had assumed that deaf jokes had been “canceled” in our era of hypersensitivity, but found a whole trove of them online, sponsored, interestingly, by various deaf groups, proving that we may be hearing-deprived, but we still like to laugh, even at ourselves. Here are a couple.

Three hard of hearing dudes are standing on a street corner. First dude says “Brrrr, it’s windy. Second one says, “No … it’s Thursday.” Third one says, “Me too, let’s go get a drink.”

A man tells his buddy, “I got a new hearing aid, the best money can buy. It’s state of the art.” His buddy asks, “What kind is it?” The man replies, “A quarter to twelve.”

Marietta Pritchard lives in Amherst. She can be reached in person if you speak clearly, or at mppritchard@comcast.net.