I can’t be the only one getting heartily sick of trigger warnings (and perhaps the term itself should come with a trigger warning? After all, triggers are attached to devices that cause untold misery and damage.).
The latest to fall foul of the accursed things is that rather good novelist Anthony Horowitz. He claimed that he was asked to change a passage in his last murder mystery that described a Native American character attacking someone with a scalpel. Responding in the Spectator, he wrote: “Scalpel, of course, comes from the Latin word scalpellus (from scalpere, to cut) and has nothing to do with scalping, which derives from the Middle English word scalpe (top of the head). But such niceties were irrelevant to my quite sensitive sensitivity reader. I made the changes [scalpel became surgical instrument], but I will confess they hurt. It just feels wrong to be told what to write by an outside party, no matter how well-meaning.” I couldn’t agree more and fear that we are in danger of losing nuance and true meaning in our use of the English language.
