I've just seen some posts complaining very stridently that a University gave a trigger warning to archaeology students that they would be seeing some dead bodies. The usual hysterical stuff was there - snowflakes, woke brigade, man up, it wasn't like that in my day. That last one made me belatedly realise what the problem really is. It's not trigger warnings: it's the words "trigger warning". It's complete nonsense to say "it wasn't like that in my day" because it was like that in my day - and my day was quite a while ago. What it wasn't was "called that" in my day. TV programs used to routinely show "mature content" warnings before some programs, the whole system of rating movies according to their content has been around since movies were invented and I am perfectly sure that archaeology professors have been prefacing their lectures with the information that there are dead bodies in the slide show for as long as there has been archaeology. Nobody ever objected to any of it. The ONLY difference is that all those things are now called "trigger warnings" - a term whose first use was in the 1990s. The people who object to the perfectly sensible notion that you should tell people when there is something that could upset them are the only ones being "triggered" by the "trigger warning". We need to start issuing trigger warnings about trigger warnings so that the poor dear sensitive snowflakes who object to the very notion of politeness can cover their ears.

I never thought of a horse as being controversial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_(horse)

It's all absurd IMO.

Then you have forgotten this and the terrible consequences it had for us here on wordcraft.

quote:

Originally posted by Geoff:

It's all absurd IMO.

I'm not sure what you think is absurd... the idea of warning people that something they are about to see, hear or read might upset them or the idea that other people might get upset at you for being considerate of someone's feelings. None of the "snowflakes" stuff started until after the PHRASE "trigger warning" started to be used. Exactly the same kind of warnings were given on things when I was a kid but nobody complained about them because nobody called them "trigger warnings".