The LABEL prize

 This is going to be a short read. I recently came upon a tweet where the author wrote that suffering from a loss of smell and taste due to COVID was particularly hard on him because he’s a foodie. No, he’s not a chef or a food critic. He’s a run of the mill, food eater. What on earth does a foodie mean? Who isn’t one? And you really have to be privileged if the worst that you experience during COVID is the loss of smell. For me it was the best thing that happened. I have superb olfactory nerves and the fact that I couldn’t smell the liters of sanitizers that the docs used when coming in and out of my room was fabulous. I couldn’t smell the meds or the injection swabs or even the cleansers they used to clean my bathroom was a boon. More importantly, I had to live on hospital food for a month, and not having a sense of smell nor taste was the silver lining to a very dark cloud. So yes, back to foodies. Who are you people? What does it mean? Does it mean you like variety? Who doesn’t? Or does it mean you really savor your food? So do cows. They don’t call themselves grazies. 

In India there is the #sareelover!   Much like the foodie above, what does that mean? That one likes to wear sarees? That people collect them?  Everybody and their grandmother is a saree lover by that definition. Same thing with fashionistas. What does that mean? Going to shops, buying things and discarding them in three months? That’s just a fear of commitment. If three fourths of your wardrobe is not half as old as you are, I think you’re characterless.

Also, What if you’re in the education industry? You become an educator? W. T. F. does that mean? I have never seen a teacher go into a classroom and say "I’m your educator". Show me an adult who’s not one. Kevin Hart has a drunk in-and-out of jail father and he says, his father educated him on what NOT to do.  Nobody hires an educator. They hire a teacher, professor or coordinator etc. Why do teachers think being a teacher is not enough? They have to upgrade their profession into a more meaty term. Why do folks have to APPEAR to be fancier than they really are? We can use newfangled terms like ‘alternative facts’ but we all know what that means!