Changing language, one tweet at at time

Don’t anger a woman with a mommy blog.

That could be the modern equivalent to the old adage of “never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” It’s origins are murky —no, not Mark Twain —but the message is clear: don’t mess with the press.

Busy Canadian mother and blogger Melanie Cote finally had the luxury of reading a book alone, without kids or household responsibilities, on a plane for a recent business trip. She recounts happily reading Who Do You Love, Jennifer Weiner’s newest novel, until she came across an offending passage that contained the word “retarded.”Twice.

Upset, Cote stopped reading, and started writing. The result was her blog post, "To the best-selling author who robbed me of the ending."

“In the midst of a conversation between the main female character and a friend in their teens, the one girl drops the R-word and the other girl responds with the same word. It was like a sneak attack in what felt like a ‘safe place’. Retarded. It pains me to type it out. Such an ugly word,” she wrote.

In an interview, Cote said that the it all happened quickly after that. She sent a tweet to Weiner, a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author with 11 million books in print, and had a reply the same day. She said the initial tweet was simple, asking her to please reconsider using the offending word, and she attached the blog post.

Weiner replied, and also tweeted the page to her 123,000 Twitter followers, asking “This is the passage in question. Scene takes place in '93. Did I blow it?”And tweeted out Cote’s blog post along with the question “In WHO DO YOU LOVE, in a scene set in 1993, one teenager asks another, ‘is she retarded?’ Was that offensive?”

Cote also sent Weiner a Time magazine story about author John Green’s apology for using the same word in his novel Paper Towns. Green sent this message to a fan via Twitter: “Yeah, I regret it. At the time, I thought an author's responsibility was to reflect language as I found it, but now…”

Originally Weiner was not going to change it, said Cote; she was standing with the many people who were supporting her. But Cote thinks it was the Green story, along with a few other mothers and herself who convinced the author to rethink her stance.

“When she tweeted me back, she said ‘I was just being true to character, the person didn’t do it as an insult, and if you send me back the book I will give you your money back, I can donate it to a local book seller’," Cote said.

“There was a lengthy and rather fiery discussion on the Internet where people called me all sorts of names,” Cote said.

“In the end (Weiner) tweeted back to say she’s going to reconsider rewriting the passage and can get the point across about the characters without using that word. She tweeted back to a couple of other parents who dove in on this discussion to save me from the trolls, saying that she understood their point.”

What about books that were written in different times?

“Obviously we can’t change the past and nobody wants anyone to go back and rewrite history,”says Cote. [But] a word like that that takes the wind out of the sails of anyone who has an intellectual disability or loves someone with an intellectual disability.

“We don’t use those words we’ve stopped saying in current texts, nobody throws in the n-word as a drive-by, we just don’t talk that way anymore, we don’t write that way,”she said.

“Just because people with intellectual disabilities never had a Martin Luther King doesn’t mean that those words, and that discrimination, isn’t as present in the world.”

What were they saying online?

“It’s ridiculous…rewriting history…are you going to change every book that’s out there…you’re promoting censorship… by excluding common language of an era you revise history…It’s not an insult, it’s not like I would say it to someone who is mentally challenged.”

“If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, then you know it’s an insult,”Cote said.

“Why are we even having this conversation? Lots of people, including my relatives and people I know very well, thought that this was something that I should not have stuck my foot into.”

Cote explained that after some thoughtful conversation, the author changed her mind.

“There was no need for her to use this word in the manner that she did in the book…it didn’t do anything to move the story forward."

You can find Jennifer Weiner on Twitter at @jenniferweiner, and Melanie Cote at @mommydoCA.