One more try to use { and }

I've asked this before in the forums and absolutely no one had a clue because no one responded. in months... so I'm going to try again and explain it more clearly.

How do I make literal { and } show up in text as text?

I tried every trick mentioned and they don't work. I can use the html equivalents of { and } and save them, and it works... until someone else tries to edit that same page and its gone again. is there no way to protect special characters like this so we can use them? or are they totally unusable in fckeditor? I've tried the features:

FCKConfig.ProtectedTags = '{|}'

and that didn't work. Or at least it did the above, they seemed to work, but really upon reopening to edit them, they were converted to literal { and } in source and upon saving they were lost again...

Any help would be appreciated.

~Phil