Go passion yourself!

I really and truly hate 'passion'!

From time to time a word like 'passion' falls into the grubby hands of the common language thugs. Instead of morphing the word, incorporating and nurturing it on a new path like 'cool', 'wicked', 'sick' and 'roll', the dirty vandals proceed to thump and bash it and, in a faux-learned frenzy, start littering every inarticulate sentence with it. Such has been the degrading fate of poor old 'passion'. Now I don't think this is just a South African thing, although it has reached epidemic proportions here. It seems to have gone global, pervading the English linguistic zeitgeist and poisoning it from within.

According to that mighty useful thingy called Wikipedia, Passion is the emotion of feeling very strongly about a subject or person. Think about that. The thing you are passionate about MUST raise strong EMOTION deep within you. It comes from the Latin 'passio' - to suffer! Yes, thats right, suffer! Translated that means you have to ache, burn, yearn, long and be consumed by the thing. It must drive you to the edge! You should break down, explode with joy or wail when you think about the object of your passion, depending upon its state at the time I guess. I am not thinking Human Resources Department here people.

Once the domain of Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence and people who needed a word to really elevate a thought or feeling about life, love or standing for an ideal, it has now become the stock standard payoff line on CV's, in job interviews and well just about everything really. If these people are to be believed, there are bankers out there with a passion for logging hourly exchange rates, drivers with a passion for delivering parcels, passionate gardeners loving the hole they are digging in rocky ground, computer programmers passionate about debugging 10000 lines of code and even lion tamers passionate about scooping up the lion poop at the end of the taming day! Are they aching inside with burning passion for these jobs? I suggest rather that you enjoy gardening, manning the complaints desk at an airline is NOT something you are passionate about (although this one may give you that necessary strong feeling deep within!), its something you can do or at best do effectively. Every idiotic Idols contestant is NOT passionate about making mindless pop music. Regardless of what they all say, there is no fire and ache in probably 99% of the lying rodents. Some like singing, some love singing, most are sold on the idea of making loads of money if anything. 'Passion', however, seems to have become the new benchmark of commitment. If you are not passionate, you might as well not apply. We don't take 'interested', 'keen to learn', good at' or 'like' seriously. Its passionate or push off! Use it or lose out!

When I think about what has happened to 'passion', I see a Klimt on a polystyrene burger box, Mozart in a washing powder commercial, Hamlet in a bad rap song, yo. They would never recover from the association, their souls sold. Well, similarly 'passion' is lost to us forever in a haze of tacky, plastic, insincere associations.

For those of you who don't know what I am on about or, for that matter, what an oxymoron is...'passionate accountant' is one you are free to use! Goodbye oxymoron...

Go 'passion' yourselves!