Word-grumble, part three

The last of these for this year, I promise. The ubiquitous marketing slogan is "We have a passion" -- for building bigger SUVs, baking cookies, giving financial advice, teaching school, running airlines. Once, people were proud to be good at something, and had healthy enthusiasm for excellence. But that's not good enough: Now, they must have passion.

But do they know what passion is? Passion is powerful, almost or wholly out-of-control emotion, as in sex, war, or rage. We speak of a "crime of passion," which means the perpetrator was so fired with emotion that he lost his normal judgment. Mr. Spock never had a passion for being Capt. Kirk's first officer, which was clearly a good thing. I do not want my accountant to have a passion about numbers, as it might cause him to mess up my taxes.

Sometimes we say "baseball is my passion," but that does imply at least some loss of reason. But to say "we have a passion for making hiking boots" is to say that we are losing control of reason on the subject of hiking boots. In my book, it's a negative trend when we are passionate when we should be rational.