Karl Blitz devoted himself to devising a logical system of universal symbols that would make it impossible for Hitler-style propaganda to succeed—”inconsistencies and falsehoods would be instantly exposed.” There was no response, and it looked like his life’s work was a failure. Then in the late 1960s Shirley McNaughton, a teacher at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Center who despaired of reaching the children who couldn’t speak, ran across a copy of Bliss’s book and gave it a try: “Kids whose communicative worlds had been defined by the options of pointing to a picture of a toilet, or waiting for someone to ask the right question, started talking about a car trip with a father, a brother’s new bicycle, a pet cat’s habit of hiding under the bed. Kids who were assumed to be severly retarded showed remarkable ingenuity in getting their messages across.”
—Languagehat on In the Land of Invented Languages
