Well, it’s an authorised adaptation of a children’s book that bills itself as an ‘interactive fairy tale’ and is written in clear, simple language. The characters aren’t nuanced, and the moral’s rather heavy-handed for adults. I’m not sure what Elizabeth should have called Roland, but ‘jerk’ seems angelically restrained to me, in the circumstances. The original book used the word ‘bum’, and it was very definitely for children.
I was brought up short by the word ‘jerk’, not because I felt it was overly strong, but because it very definitely wasn’t the word I remembered. I couldn’t remember what the word was, though. The original ‘bum’ wasn’t it, either. Apparently in the UK editions they substituted ‘toad’, which was kind of dated even when the book came out, and that’s what I was thinking of.