by Arika Okrent
This was his holiday greeting the next year:
A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU, PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO ALL MEN. Yes, Good Will to all Men, but not to a woman, Mrs. McNaughton. She’s trying to kill me, make me drop dead so she can take over, but im not going to. Are you protecting your fair maiden, well she’s not fair. She has black hair and a black mind.
At one point, Shirley almost resigned, but found she couldn’t leave her students behind. Instead, she accepted dealing with Bliss as another part of her job. He still came back every spring, and she still greeted him warmly. Despite everything that had happened, she maintained respect and admiration for him, and really did want to please him. Her equanimity in the face of it all resulted in a workable but absurd situation, as captured in one of her letters to Bliss.
Dear Charles:
This is to acknowledge receipt of your July 19th letter, “Three Devastating Proofs That Shirley McNaughton Is Catastrophically Ignorant of My Logical Symbol System and the Catastrophic Results of Her Ignorance,” and your more recent letter of July 21st. Prior to your second letter I discussed with [the administration] your request for $5,000. Please direct all future correspondence relating to your expenses to them.
Thank you for your speedy response to our cable regarding the thickness of the pointer, and for your July 21st letter expressing your desire to work on symbols in September.
We look forward to your involvement in developing more symbols in the fall.
Sincerely,
Shirley
Eventually, the workable could no longer coexist with the absurd. Bliss brought the lawyers back, and the center, desperate to make him go away, settled with him. In 1982, the OCCC got an exclusive, noncancelable, and perpetual license to use Blissymbolics, and he got $160,000. Easter Seals, the charitable foundation under whose auspices the program was now working, paid the settlement.
That’s right. There’s no other way to put it: Bliss, self-proclaimed savior of humanity, stole $160,000 from crippled children.
I found out about the details of the settlement when I met with Shirley in the sleepy Ontario town of Guelph, where she lives with her husband in a tidy retirement village. There are Blissymbols throughout their town house, on a mirror over the piano, on needlepoint cushions in the guest room. The kitchen back-splash is formed by a chain of painted tiles that say, in Blissymbols, “People helping people helping people helping people.”
When she told me how much Bliss got in the settlement, I couldn’t contain myself. I told her how selfish, 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 movement, but they did reflect a widespread popular preoccupation with, as the title of one 1938 best seller called it, “the tyranny of words.” Both Bliss and Weilgart advertised their projects not just as a way for people of different language backgrounds to communicate with each other but as a way to uncover the truths that our natural languages hid or distorted. They worked on the assumption that language warped the mind, and that assumption was not just some crazy outsider philosophy. It was very much a part of the general intellectual climate from the 1930s to the 1950s, when Bliss and Weilgart were developing their systems.
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, The Meaning of Meaning (1923), C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards blamed all sorts of confusion on “the superstition that words are in some way parts of things or always imply things corresponding to them”—the “Word Magic” problem that Ogden later proposed to solve with his Basic English. Ten years later Count Alfred Korzybski published his Science and Sanity, a dense, jargon-filled tome on the ways in which language “enslaves” us by conditioning our brains to perceive a false reality. More people probably claimed to have read it than actually did—even his followers called the azure-tinted volume “the blue peril”—but Korzybski’s ideas, as interpreted by popularizers like Stuart Chase (of the previously mentioned Tyranny of Words) and S. I. Hayakawa (of the 1941 Book-of-the-Month Club selection Language in Action), rippled through the culture. For a time, any cocktail party guest with pretensions to erudition could pepper his conversation with a “general relativity” here, a “neuro-semantic reaction” there, a melodious “Korzybski” or two to tie it all together, and he would be rewarded with some knowing, serious head nodding.
In the halls of mainstream academia, however, Korzybski’s name got a different reaction. He was an independent scholar without professionally recognized expertise in any of the fields he drew on in creating his boastful, sprawling theory of everything. He published his books and ran his seminars under the rubric of his own Institute of General Semantics, where he promoted techniques for overcoming the thinking errors caused by language—beware of the verb “to be” (“Is-ness is insanity,” he liked to say), mentally subscript the objects you talk about (to remind yourself that there is only pencil1, pencil2, pencil3, and so on and no abstraction “pencil” that covers all cases), and frequently insert an “etc.” (to remind yourself that there is always more to the story than your words would have you believe).
It didn’t help that his seminars had the flavor of a tent revival, complete with emotional manipulation disguised as object lessons (he liked to bring a female student up to the stage and slap her face, then tell the audience that their horrified reaction was “unjustified, as what they have seen turned out to be merely a scientific demonstration of the mechanism of identification”) and testimonials. People in various professions claimed that training in general semantics (as Korzybski’s discipline came to be called) could solve an astonishing array of problems: businessmen said it saved their clients' money; psychiatrists said it cured alcoholism, homosexuality, frigidity, and nymphomania; teachers said it cured reading problems, stuttering, and stage fright; a dentist even said it helped keep fillings in place.
Many people were attracted to the idea that if you could control your language, you could control your mind and solve your problems. (The idea still has some popularity today, in the form of moneymaking self-help ventures like Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a descendant of general semantics.) And they took seriously the warnings about language and mind control coming from the new literature of dystopia. In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, published in 1938, citizens of a futuristic collective society cannot conceive of their own individuality, because they lack the pronoun “I.” In George Orwell’s 1984 (first published in 1949), a totalitarian state controls its subjects through the imposition of Newspeak—people who are denied words for subversive thoughts are rendered incapable of thinking those thoughts.
Poor language. People had always been blaming one thing or another on it, but in the 1930s and 1940s it really took a beating. Before that, in the Esperanto era, language was accused of turning people against each other. The problem was that it prevented mutual understanding, and the solution was to invent or choose a language that everyone could understand. In the post-Esperanto era, language was being accused of everything from genocide to tooth decay. Now the problem with language was its dangerous grip on thought. But what was the solution? Not to invent a new language. No one took that idea seriously anymore. Proposals like Blissymbolics were laughed right out of the arena. (Bliss described a response he received from a prominent general semanticist as “not nice at all”) This time, the solution was to bring language into line with reality, to polish the grime and the rust off the tools, teach people how to use them properly, and put them into service for the truth.
But leaving aside the question of how the truth was to be determined, where exactly was this grime and rust? And how was it to be removed? There were differences of opinion, of course. Ogden had a problem with abstract words posing as truly meaningful words—“fictions” like “causation” and “political” mimicked the behavior of good solid words like “chair” and “red.” The key was to stick to the good solid words. But for Korzybski “chair” and “red” were just as big a part of the problem; the key was to constantly remind ourselves that there was no such thing as a chair (only chair1, chair2, chair3, chair3 as I experienced it in 1934, chair3 as I experience it now, and so on) and that red was only a subjective individual experience of a certain wavelength of light.
For Orwell (as expressed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”), the villains were tired metaphors, long, fancy words, and passive verbs.
Though critics took issue with the various cures proposed for the language disease, no one really questioned the original diagnosis: language was a bad influence on thought. But in the 1950s scholars began to look more closely at that background assumption. Fields like psychology, anthropology, and sociology had picked up the machinery of the hard sciences—empirical observation, measurement, experiment—and were figuring out ways to apply it to the “soft” areas of human behavior: mind, meaning, culture. When it came to the matter of human thought, and what may or may not be influencing it, a modern social scientist had two choices: (1) reject all discussion of “thought” as unscientific, because it was impossible to observe directly (the stance of behavioral psychology, which was having a heyday); or (2) find a way to test your hypothesis using cold, hard data. Sitting in your armchair and musing about words and thought was no longer an acceptable option.
At the same time, the language/thought question was getting fresh attention in academic circles with the posthumous re-publication of the papers of Benjamin Whorf. Whorf had been a chemical engineer, working as an inspector at a fire insurance company, when he began studying linguistics as a hobby. He went on to work with the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and to produce highly respected studies of Native American languages. Though Whorf’s papers were published in the premier journals and he was granted an honorary fellowship at Yale, he was still something of an outsider. His primary employment remained at the insurance company, and he n
ever completed an advanced degree. There was also a religious or spiritual angle to some of his linguistic investigations (he was a follower of the eccentric Theosophy movement) that made many of his academic contacts uncomfortable. His ideas about the influence of language on thought made them even more uncomfortable, as they seemed dangerously close to the fashionable language polemics about “the tyranny of words” floating around out there among the linguistically naive masses.
But Whorf (though perhaps naive in other ways) was not linguistically naive. His ideas about language and thought were informed by a highly technical and sophisticated understanding of the grammatical structure of languages that were very different from any European language. He saw what he called “the new, and for the most part probably misguided interest in semantics” as marred by the “parochial viewpoint to which ‘language’ means simply ‘English,’” and he tried to dissociate himself from the “various popular bromides about the misleading nature of words.”
He began to formulate his ideas about the relationship of thought to language when, after finally piecing together a grammatical description of Hopi (an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona), he realized that he knew how to form plurals but not how to use them. It was like knowing that the English plural is formed by es when a word ends in an “s” sound, but not knowing that it’s inappropriate to refer to a pile of rice as “rices.” He realized that “the category of plural in Hopi was not the same thing as in English, French or German. Certain things that were plural in these languages were singular in Hopi.” For example, something like “day” could not be pluralized in Hopi, because days were experienced one at a time; they could not be assembled into an objective group that could be observed all at once—a Hopi criterion for pluralness. Whorf connected this observation to other features of the language that suggested the Hopi experience of time was not the same as it was for a speaker of an SAE (Standard Average European) language. Could it be that a different way of categorizing things in language reflected a different way of categorizing things in the world?
