Making this distinction, and having a specific word for something that is not your slice of pie, but also not an actual psychological trigger, is also REALLY important for making sure that the word “trigger” can retain its original, specific, purposeful, and collectively understood clinical meaning (both inside and outside online fannish communities).
If we encourage everyone to lump things that just make them slightly uncomfortable or simply aren’t to their taste in under the word “trigger”, it actually dilutes the meaning of the word. It makes it harder for us all to, for the most part, collectively agree on and understand what exactly is being described when the word gets used.
And that destruction of shared precise definitions is a problem! It is really useful to have the communal language to be able to clearly and quickly delineate between “this grosses me out, no thanks” and “this is going to set off a trauma episode, rattle my brain, and probably throw off the rest of my day/week as a result” while also maintaining your privacy, and to know that you will be understood in what you are saying. Not having it is actually detrimental to the effort of making our communities safe and navigable for people living with trauma. Which is a goal that is much more important to me, personally, than the idea of not being “cutesy” (a word which in this case which sounds a lot like it’s being used as a euphemism for “cringe”).
(Also, one has to wonder if people told Shakespeare he was being childish when he made up entirely new words that are still widely used in the English language today…… 🤔)
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