Okay, folks have really got to stop using the words ‘passion’ and ‘passionate’ willy-nilly. I sort of lost my patience with the term this morning while listening to NPR. During a station-break shoutout, they identified an accounting firm. Said accounting firm claimed that they were “passionate” about the business of accounting.

You’re kidding me, right?

This makes me want to go back and erase any time I’ve ever said I was passionate about anything. Time for a new word. It’s been profaned by IT managers and business execs, the Wal-Mart philanthropic arm: the whole dull, mediocre world at this point. It’s lost its semantic clout.