IT’S COME TO THIS: The term “trigger warning” is now triggering because it “has connections to guns.”
More here: Who’s Oppressing Whom?
But that’s not why Brandeis wants to get rid of the term. It thinks “trigger” is associated with violence. Okay, if we’re going to take that seriously, let’s note that the word “trigger” derives from the Dutch word trekker, from which we get “trek.” Today, trek means a journey, but it originally meant to pull, like a wagon pulled by oxen (hence the evolution of the word). “Trigger” means something you pull; it may indeed be associated with violence, but only in the minds of people who make that association.
But if words associated with violence have to go—Muad’Dib!—there are far deadlier killing words out there. For instance, our political discourse is drenched in military language: “battleground states,” “ad blitzes,” “taking flak,” “over the target,” “scorched earth,” “political crusade,” “pyrrhic victories,” “skirmish,” “belligerents,” “political ambushes,” “nuclear options,” “war on poverty,” etc.
As I wrote in January of 2011, when the left’s moral panic du jour was focused on Sarah Palin’s clip art, and Michael Hirsch of the National Journal went on MSNBC and demanded “a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word [in] public forums,” for gun and war related language. “Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”
Why, there’s even a narrow-interest cable channel that reaches millions of viewers while using such hateful militaristic rhetoric 24 hours a day. Imagine how they are influencing impressionable minds, with language such as this:
- The Blitz
- The Bomb
- The Crackback
- The Red Zone
- The Special Teams Gunner
- The Shotgun
- The Suicide Squad
- Tackle
- The Trenches
I’d make a joke that Roger Goodell will be banning those hateful words any day now. But given that it’s now 2021 — he probably will be.
UPDATE: Forget the militaristic language, which has been a part of football nomenclature for decades — the NFL has a real-life gun problem. “Why are so many NFL players, mostly physically imposing college men, busted for carrying weapons, often the kind designed to spray many bullets and kill many people? Where do they go, why, when and with whom that they find it essential to carry guns? If they expect life-threatening trouble, why go there? If they expect to have to defend themselves with deadly force why is that a logical destination?”
(Updated and bumped.)