You know what frosts my flakes?
Trigger warnings.
It is getting difficult to read a news story or social media post without first being warned that reading it might cause me to experience an emotion.
Warning: This post discusses divorce.
Warning: This article contains political opinions.
Warning: This story illustrates what happens when a man tries to make dinner without adult supervision.
At this rate, pretty soon we’ll need a warning before the warning:
CAUTION: The following trigger warning may contain information about something you don’t want to know exists.
Just as ridiculous are posts that are too terrified to spell actual words.
Instead of writing a word, they replace half the letters with dashes and asterisks. For example, h*ll, d**th or s*x.
Oh, thank goodness for those asterisks! Without them, I might have read the real word and had a meltdown right on the spot.
If everyone over age 10 who is reading your post already knows what the word is, what exactly did the asterisk accomplish?
It’s like my two-year-old grandson putting a lampshade over his head and pretending nobody can see him.
Now, I don’t want profanity flooding my newsfeed either. But there’s a remarkably simple solution.
Don’t use profanity.
There are more than 170,000 words in common use in the English language. Surely you can find one that doesn’t require replacing three letters with punctuation.
Act like an adult who understands the finer points of effective communication.
Life occasionally involves unpleasant things. People die. Accidents happen. Bad things happen to good people. Men attempt recipes involving more than three ingredients.
I’m Grandpa Grumpy, and if your readers need a warning before they can read your words, followed by asterisks so they won’t recognize the words they’re already reading, maybe the real trigger is common sense.
Come to think of it, this rant probably needs a trigger warning of its own:
Warning: This video contains opinions expressed by a man over 65.