Trigger Un-happy

I was brunching with one of my pals the other day when he hit me with a stray inquiry: isn’t the term “triggered” a little problematic?

I’ll admit, initially I was incredulous. I love an innovative grievance as much as the next scribbler, but that seemed a little out there. I blithely told him he was being silly and snagged the last piece of table-bread to punctuate my point.

But a few days later an amazing coincidence occurred that forced me to reconsider the whole issue. I was brunching with a different pal when I decided to bring up what Pal #1 had said about “triggered” being problematic. Pal #2 flinched and cowered as soon as the words left my bread-stuffed mouth. When Pal #2 finally stopped shaking he murmured solemnly, “I’m sorry…but that word reminds me of…of…”

And off he ran into the busy street.

I later found out that Pal #2 had been the victim of a gunpoint mugging, pistol-whipping, and barrel-sucking attack not but a few weeks prior, and any mention of guns set him off something terrible. He was, in fact, “triggered” by the word “triggered”.

How is it that we, as a culture, deemed it acceptable to use a violent, gun-related adjective to describe a state of mental agitation? Didn’t we suspect that the term “trigger warning” might end up making people imagine a man yelling “trigger warning!” because someone nearby was pulling a gun from their coat? Just say the word “triggered” a few times…triggered, triggered…such an aggressive sounding “grr” word. All together, a real nasty scene.

After apologizing profusely to both of my pals I decided that I wanted to attack the problem with flying fists, so to speak, and quickly invent a new word to replace the unpleasant expression “triggered”.

It took me a while, I will say. So many words had so many unhappy implications. “Sparked” made me think of being electrocuted, “boinged”made me think of a someone flicking me on the nose, “jumpered”, obviously, jumper-cables coming to life and running rampant. It seemed that every possible avenue I went down was a straight-up dead end.

Finally however, I came up with a solution. In order to avoid unpleasant associations with bad words, all I would have to do is come up with a fake word! Imagination is the ever-present third door after all, and I believe it provided me with the perfect fix.

So here it is folks, the new term for “triggered”, dubbed by me, shall be:

“spa-ajd’d”

No bad links there, unless you’re an alien ;) (and I mean space alien, obviously).

I urge you all to follow me in using this brand new word and throwing the body of “triggered” down a shallow, muddy grave. The journey towards a safe language is long and hard, but eliminating “triggered” is a good place to start. I only hope that with the power of imagination, we one day have a whole new vocabulary to replace all of our unpleasant words, and live free from them and their negative, creepy shadows.