If you’re fat and you die tomorrow, how would you feel about your peers posthumously describing you as a ‘gentle giant’?
Working in PR, I’ve always taken a slightly morbid interest in how deaths are portrayed in the media, so I often find myself reading through obituaries of people I’ve never heard of, but have depressingly achieved a lot more than I have.
Anyway, I ask because I've been reading through some of the articles following the recent death of the outspoken Lib Dem MP Cyril Smith, leading me to become increasingly narked off by the use of this terrible, denigrating and, frankly, meaningless phrase 'gentle giant'.
What is it to be a ‘Gentle Giant’? The implication here is that most fat people are violent club-swinging cave trolls, incapable of expressing basic human gentleness by their substantial girth and rampant appetites. Lock your fridges, hide your babies, save yourselves - there's a fatty about!
You see, former Lib Dem MP Cyril Smith has been dubbed ‘the gentle giant of Rochdale’ by the Guardian. What belittling nonsense. Was there a period in Rochdale's industrious history where the town suffered an epidemic of obese people smashing bus-shelters, raiding fridges and sitting on cats?
If a small person dies, we don’t label them a ‘Passive Imp’ on the assumption that the majority of vertically-challenged people are somehow socially-retarded mythical creatures – it’s pure madness, if not utterly patronising.
Admittedly there are more things one can be currently angry at, like the Coulson media blackout, the War in Iraq and Bono, but it does irk me so.
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