TRIGGERED

If this website is some kind of practical joke, then I'm very impressed - sadly, of course it isn't. My niece has got a cat named Lolita - better get it changed quick before the Raising Kids Brigade (RKB) find out. Dolores, Lola, Loli, or the diminutive form Lolita is a common girls' name in Spanish speaking countries - and the hispanophiles (watch it) amongst you will know its literal meaning as will fans of Nabokov its literary intent (the annotated version of the book comes highly recommended).

Exerting social pressures on others human beings do all the time (and I find such a disagreeable trait): it gives us a sense of importance; what I find interesting here is how these reflexes are affected by several powerful prisms.

PRISM #1 Morons
The RKB are clearly not linguists or particularly literary, or at best simply choose to overlook the absurd and illogical implications of their complaint made 'on grounds of bad taste' and no attempt is made to extend the argument beyond that. Heaven forbid we have bad taste (or friends or cats named Lolita). The Woolies' press officer's unblushing response: '... they'd never heard of the word and in fact, neither had I. I had to go on to Wikipedia to find out the meaning of the word.'

PRISM #2 Scratchers
This is a bed for children. Beds are for having sex. Lolita is the fictional girl in Nabokov's book. Perverts use this word a lot. A more tortuous example of complex equivalence you will be hard pressed to find. Who knows what the fuck it is we're buying at IKEA? Swedes must have so much fun at the expense of our ignorance.

PRISM #3 Celebrities
These beds are available all over the world - the RKB pick on Woolies because it guarantees exposure to their personal agendas. It reminds me when, of all the rock bands in the world who do Satanic backwards messages, it had to be Judas Priest that get pulled up in front of a judge.

PRISM #4 Taboos
Taboos are constantly shifting - and, where children were a century ago an expendable commodity, they now inhabit the domain of the most precious of all taboos. Or so you'd think. Yet it's interesting how even this now seems to be slowly shifting in new directions - read the comments at some of the tabloid UK websites (Daily Express for example) - you'll find a surprisingly relaxed attitude to the fuss the RKB are attempting to invoke. This shift and greater cynicism to the exploitation of the child taboo is noticeable in the Maddie McCann mystery, and in wider cultural and artistic senses too.

PRISM #5 Psycholinguists
Language is essentially an artificial construct, nothing means much beyond the ways in which we are triggered to understand it. This, of course, is a huge topic worthy of book treatment - however, the most interesting discovery for me is how the language we're wired to employ ourselves affects our own behaviour. So, in other words, in this example we see that the more the RKBers emotively talk about Lolita beds, the more we know about the kind of thoughts, images, and obsessions that they will be undoubtedly be experiencing in their own Hopens and Anebodas.