how blind, how crazy I thought he was. “Yes, it was difficult,” she said, “but it was all for the good of the kids who needed it in the end. Now I’m around the same age that he was when he first came to us, and I think I understand him better. I see that there’s not a lot of time left, and that has made me less tolerant of some things.”
Her biggest regret about Bliss’s behavior is that it hurt the reputation of their program. The Blissymbol method is used in scattered, individual schools in Canada, Sweden, and a few other countries, but it never gained traction in the United States, Britain, or any of the places that tend to determine the types of technologies and teaching materials that will be made widely available. Other symbol systems are used today, but they are more picture-like, less abstract, and less flexible than the Blissymbols. They serve for communication, but not as a bridge to full language—at least not for kids with the types of disabilities Shirley has worked with. She sees the predominance of these other symbol systems as “a reflection of how society treats disability—‘pictures are good enough.’ There’s no concern with enriching. They aren’t worried about the dignity of full language.”
On my last night in Toronto I had dinner with Paul Marshall—a former Bliss student of one of Shirley’s colleagues—who now works on projects for the Blissymbol program. His cerebral palsy is relatively mild—his motions are jerky and unbalanced, but he can walk, and he can point and type with one finger. However, he cannot use his voice. He came to the Blissymbol program when he was twelve, able to recognize some written words, but mostly dependent on his mother’s guessing. He was frustrated, angry, and depressed. By eighteen, he had made the transition to full English text. Today, he lives in his own apartment, about 120 miles north of Toronto, and works as a Webmaster. He told me, by spelling it out on a laminated alphabet grid, “Bliss is one of the greatest things ever to happen to me.” After dinner he went to catch a bus back home. Later that night, a major snowstorm hit, and the highway he was on was shut down for five hours. He was able to ask his fellow passengers to call his mother and tell her not to worry. He used his own words and spoke his own mind. No vague interpretation, no guessing. He was only as stuck and frustrated as the rest of the people on that bus.
Bliss was fond of saying, “The greatest hindrance to Blissym-bolics is the fact that I am still alive.” Most of the time he meant this as an accusation against society and its inability to notice genius until it no longer walks among them. But sometimes he seemed to mean it as self-reproach, an admission that he was his own worst enemy. He angered and drove away almost everyone who could have done him any good.
And yet, in a few, he inspired a devoted kind of loyalty—partly based on his manic charisma, and partly based on pity. Shirley never expressed more than mild exasperation with him. On his last trip to Toronto, they spent their days together in a room full of administrators and lawyers, going through legal discovery for his case against her work. At night, she went to his seedy hotel room to help him put drops in his ears for a medical condition. When I asked her how that made any sense, she answered, “Well, he had no one else.”
Bliss spent the money on a big publication run of his own Blissymbols teaching manual. It is the sharpest looking of all his publications—a bright red hard-vinyl cover over 564 high-quality card-stock pages held together in a two-ring binder. It is professionally illustrated, and all the symbols are drawn to his specifications. The content, however, is the same old classic Bliss—blustery and preposterous. Here is how he advises teaching the symbol for steam:
Put a saucepan or a kettle on the stove and when the steam comes out let your handicapped child put its finger near the steam. Of course, it will get slightly burned, but it will be a lesson for life what steam really is and why it is the opposite of rain, which is usually rather cold or slightly warm.
Most of the books were destroyed in a fire after Bliss died in 1985. Douglas Everingham, a local Sydney doctor and politician, was named one of the executors of what was left. Everingham, himself interested in the international language cause, had been an early supporter of Bliss’s work and had done what he could in the 1970s, during his term as national minister of health, to promote Blissymbolics (at great risk to his own reputation). Bliss, of course, thought Everingham didn’t try hard enough and once showed up at a public rally where he was campaigning for re-election and heckled him, crying, “Down with Everingham!” and worse.
Everingham told me by e-mail that he still thought kindly of Bliss, and encouraged me to be charitable toward him as well. He reminded me that Bliss was a Holocaust survivor, a refugee, an immigrant; Bliss had seen terrible things, and he really did believe he had invented a solution, a way to ensure those things would never happen again.
But, in looking through Bliss’s writings, I found that he did have his moments of doubt. Buried in one of his books, in a rant about psychologists and how they are always trying to read into things, is the following passage:
Take Bliss, the author of this book. He thinks that his work is motivated by his conscience, that he slaves for humanity. But it may be only a craving for the limelight of public acclaim. He rises in defence of the children of mankind (so he thinks) when he attacks the teachers. But it may be only envy and enmity and rage about their rejection of his work (which they didn’t even bother to examine).
He thinks his invention will revolutionize the 21st century. The hell it will! The teachers will be adamant. So he cries, “To dream the impossible dream, to beat the unbeatable foe, etc., etc.” feeling himself a pioneer and martyr rolled in one.
Well, what motivates him really?
He stops there.
James Cooke Brown and the Language of Logic
The Whorfian Hypothesis
Blissymbolics and aUI and the few other pictographic languages of the post-Esperanto era hardly constituted a
Of course, the Nazi and Soviet propaganda machines provided dramatic evidence for the pernicious power of language, but the “tyranny of words” idea went beyond the claim that bad people sometimes used language to bad ends. It suggested that all of us, every day, were being misled, not by lies told by others, but by our own habits of thinking, as conditioned by the very structure of our languages.
This idea had become popular even before the war. In their influential book,
