Content-Type: text/shitpost

In the 1960s my grandparents were involved in the (successful!) effort to integrate the public elementary schools in Teaneck, NJ. One of their most virulent opponents was a man named Warner. (My grandfather said “as I remember all the time that Harry Warner was complaining against busing, he sent his kid to a private school way up county where he had to be bused every day.”) My grandmother was a writer, and one way she dealt with her feelings about Mr. Warner was to go home and write a detective story in which Warner was the murder victim.

So as not to invite further attention from this vicious and bitter man, she changed the character's name to Wagner, or Wapner, or something of that sort.

But when the story was published, her editor, without informing her, changed the victim's name to “Warner”. When my grandmother saw it in print, she was appalled.

Fortunately nothing ever came of it. But my grandmother told me that she had learned her lesson. “If you want to disguise the name of someone named Warner,” she said “you don't change it to Walker; you change it to Brzezinski.”