Today this photo caption struck me as odd:

“An avid smoker, 24-year-old singer Amy Winehouse is already showing signs of emphysema.”

It was in the Spokesman with an L.A. Times story about how Amy Winehouse shows that even young people are susceptible to emphysema. So it wasn’t the content that caught my attention, but the use of “avid.” It just seems like a word predominantly associated with positive activities, usually hobbies: an avid snowboarder, an avid gardener, an avid bicyclist, an avid pheasant hunter.

I looked it up and “avid” has two main definitions:
1) having a keen interest or enthusiasm for something
2) having an eager and even greedy desire for something

So it technically works, I guess. It seems like there are a number of alternatives, like heavy smoker, habitual smoker, relentless smoker, notorious smoker and so forth.

It’s a really picky semantic matter, but that’s the fun of it. We don’t describe alcoholics as “avid drinkers.” You would never see a criminal described as an “avid car thief” regardless of the dedication and enthusiasm evident on his rap sheet.

Maybe I’ve somehow connected “avid” with “aficionado” in my head. It would strike me as very odd and even glib to describe Winehouse as a cigarette aficionado.

And to end on a complete tangent, “aficionado” first meant fans of bullfighting and wasn’t popularized in English until Ernest Hemingway introduced it in “The Sun Also Rises.” Which I happened to pick up at the library today because there’s a part I’ve been trying to remember. I also got two drink recipe books because I’m tired of Nick always running to the internet when he wants to make a drink. It was like themed summer reading without even trying.