Trigger

A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should get a trigger warning. Otherwise something nasty in the woodshed might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder or worse.

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‘I use the phrase trigger warning myself,’ wrote Kate Maltby in a Spectator blog the other day, ‘to warn Facebook friends that they may not wish to click on a link because it is likely to automatically “trigger” flashbacks for survivors of trauma.’ That’s kind, and luckily I am not triggered by split infinitives. But she and fellow admirers of the classics are shocked by a demand from four students at Columbia University for tutors to issue trigger warnings before asking for certain authors to be studied. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the students say, ‘contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom’.