I’ve never been much of a morning person. A fact I partly put down to my Grandad, Jimmy.
When I was little, he’d let me stay up with him ’til the early hours to watch black & white films. I knew George Formby, Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello inside out by the time I was ten.
Grandad had seen them all 50 times before and would commentate throughout, making daft remarks that I’d find funnier than the film.
He was particularly vocal whenever there was a lovey-dovey moment. Like the first kiss between the leading man and the beautiful starlet. My Grandad would say,
“There’s the film ruined! No point in watching it now!”
Sometimes, he’d actually get up and turn the telly off. Movie over.
Maybe he did it to spare me the awkwardness of seeing two adults necking.
Perhaps he hated love stories.
That I never thought to ask him while he was still around makes me quite emotional. I’d love to hear his answer to my question.
“Why do you always say that, Grandad?”
Does your crack itch when businesses describes themselves as passionate?
Mine too. I’m not knocking anyone, but sometimes I wonder if words have lost all meaning. Because according to Oxford Language, the word passionate can be defined as follows:
1. having, showing, or caused by strong feelings or beliefs.
2. arising from intense feelings of sexual love.
Neither meaning sounds particularly suitable for describing a business.
The first definition immediately makes me think of a cult. And you really don’t want me to go there with the second.
Synonyms for passionate make good reading too. My favourites include:
Zealous, emotional, excitable, violent and flaming.
Imagine this being a line in an ad for home insurance.
“Our violent, hard-working team is on hand 24/7 a day.’
It doesn’t exactly scream good customer service, does it?
So why passionate? How has this word, with all its depth and definition, become a byword for showing up and doing a bit of work?
Is it that all the best words and phrases been stolen by corporations and turned into meaningless slogans so that we only think in terms of value, growth and moving the bleeding needle?
Have we run out of things to say?
______________
Looking back, I understand why my Grandad would zealously chime in right on cue to show his disdain for on-screen smooching.
It’s that word passionate again. As far as Jimmy O’Connor was concerned, as soon as the hero got turned on, the film got turned off.
Because it had become nothing more than a flaming cliche.