There's a Word Stuck in my Craw.

Last night, on the train home, reading this article about the fast growing industry that specialises in home-delivered meal and grocery services to income rich but time poor folk was a reasonably innocuous affair until I got to this quote:

''For us the demand is coming from customers who work hard and don't really want the trauma of going to the supermarket and planning meals for the week. Instead, everything is on their doorstep and can be cooked within 30 minutes.''

Trauma? Really?

Inconvenience, that I can go with. Chore, sure. Hassle, undoubtedly. Logistical botheration and absolute pain in the butt at times, especially at the checkout, I totally agree.

But trauma? When did the everyday nuisance of general housekeeping become:

1. A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident.

2. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.
3. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption

So let me see if I understand this. Certain people are fortunate enough to have obviously interesting jobs that provide them with enough disposable income to spend lavish amounts of money on the necessities of life coupled with a ready access to a great variety of healthy and fresh food, yet these blessings in combination are deemed a profoundly disturbing psychological experience?

Try starvation. That's distressing. Or unemployment. Ditto with the stress levels.

By all means outsource these onerous tasks if you're really that busy, busy, busy (and really, really, really important), or if you deep down inside hate cooking but don't want to confess to this terrible sin in our present Age of the Masterchef lest your chook-raising, vegie-patch digging, jam-making foodie friends (and good on them) recoil in horror, but please, lay off overdramatising the everyday tasks that we all have to squeeze into our days just to make them sound like a gruelling challenge akin to scaling Mount Everest. Next thing you know, we'll be turning shopping and cooking into major emotional hurdles that possibly need specialised counselling and multiple sessions with support groups to negotiate. Quite honestly, the day that one is so flat out rushing around that one thinks of shopping and cooking as traumatic is the day one needs to take a serious look at one's life and possibly schedule a little time off to restore one's teetering sanity. Developing a sense of perspective would be good too. And while we're at it, showing some genuine gratitude for the bounty we enjoy and take for granted in our well-off country wouldn't go amiss either.

And yeah, yeah, I know it's just the usual sales jargon going overboard so as to be heard above the promotional racket swamping the world, but today's spin is tomorrow's accepted platitude. I just don't want us as a society going to a ridiculous place where I have to endure people putting a hand to their brow and blather-bragging in great detail about how taking ten minutes out to crack a few eggs and cook an omelet the night before induced such stress and suffering that they're now on the verge of a nervous breakdown .

Oh, all right, just possibly I too am stupendously overreacting and making a towering croque-en-bouche of out of a single profiterole. But these days, so many heavy-handed people wield words without any finesse, debasing their meaning and lowering their impact, not caring in the least how they, dare I say it, traumatise those of us who respect and love the power of our wonderful language.