We did It.

Do you remember this post about how Lily had to find the synonyms for the word orphan and how she was incredibly upset by what greeted her?

As most of you know it started a huge email campaign involving everyone I could think of, adoption groups, family members, friends, concerned parents, school teachers, (not Lily's school though, they were not interested!) radio personalities, fellow adoptive parents, magazine editors, to name a few. I was told by many of you that we crashed the website of Thesaurus .com on more than one occasion. I sent them an email E V E R Y S I N G L E D A Y. I was constantly thinking of ways to keep it going as I didn't want it loose steam before the magazine was published.

Thanks to all of you for keeping on it.

Nobody ever heard from them at all. In one of my emails I even stated this fact. It wasn't my kindest letter as you can see......

Both of my daughters started their lives living in
orphanages and as such were classified as orphans however
they were NEVER waifs strays or ragamuffins. The synonyms
that you offer for the word orphan are incorrect and need
to be removed and replaced by something that is correct
which in this case word be the phrase, no matches found.
It is unthinkable to me that you can offer this
misinformation and wrongly educate the 1000's of students
that use this site.
What baffles me more is that you don't have the decency to
reply to any of my emails.

I hate to admit but even I was growing dubious that we would ever see any results. I just kept chugging along.

Finally yesterday as I was checking email one addy in particular caught my eye.. help desk, thesaurus .com

It isn't exactly what I wanted to see but it is something. I immediately contacted Adoptive Families Magazine and asked them if they wanted to pull the story but they said, NO. This still isn't good enough so we are going to print with what we have.

Here is the email.

Dear C**e Family,

Thank you for bringing this painful situation to our attention. We
apologize for the distress our Thesaurus entry caused your daughter. The
modern uses of "orphan" differ from the historical or literary uses of
the term. Therefore, we are adding a note to the entry that will
describe how the word "orphan" has been used in the past and in
literature. We feel this common reference practice will clearly explain
the distinction between recording how the term has been used
historically and what the term accurately means now. Please let us know
if you have any further questions or concerns about this topic and we
hope that these changes will make you, as well your daughters, satisfied
users of our Web site.

Regards,

I also received an email from another thesaurus that I had contacted and they were really helpful and gave me the names and email addy for the publisher so that I can contact them. I need to explain that their definitions and synonyms are outdated. Apparently they pride themselves on being up to date.

So it's just a small step in the right direction but we did it. We did make a change and I think it is big. I thanked the lady for doing what she is doing and told her I felt it was a start but that I still believe her synonyms are incorrect and outdated.

Lily you are a ROCK STAR. You stood up for what was right and you have changed a little piece of the world by doing so.