The real meaning of the word heartbroken

EVERY week I buy a lottery ticket. Random numbers, just one line. I won £10 in 2001. Since then, nothing.

Am I heartbroken as I check my losing numbers? No, I am not. Sometimes, I’m a tad disappointed, especially when the electricity bill has arrived.

But then, I know the meaning of the word heartbroken — despite what readers may think after last week’s column about Jade Goody.

Chris Tarrant doesn’t know, though. He thinks the contestants on his new game show “Colour of Money” are heartbroken when they fail to get their greedy little hands on the thousands of pounds top prize.

He actually calls it heartbreaking when they pick the wrong colour machine (test of skill, this gameshow) and lose the money they have already “won”.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) would probably disagree with him — its definition of heartbroken is “overwhelmingly distressed”.

Personally, having held my partner in my arms as he died of cancer at the age of 52, I’m more inclined to agree with the OED’s definition than with Mr Tarrant’s.

Mind, he’s not alone. During Noel Edmonds’s similarly taxing afternoon’s offering of avarice (OED: extreme greed for wealth or material gain), “Deal Or No Deal”, Edmonds panders to the “devastated” (OED: overwhelmed with severe shock or grief) contestant who has just opened the wrong box — the one with a quarter of a million in it.

Now, if the box held a bomb and the contestant was blown to bits when it opened, that would be both heartbreaking and devastating to his/her family. To the rest of us, it would probably just make good telly. But that’s my hard, cynical side showing again.

Losing money you never had in the first place is neither hearbreaking nor devastating. Though I will accept it being a bit of a bummer (OED: an annoying or disappointing thing).

Personally, I preferred Mr Tarrant’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Not only did he not use emotive (OED: arousing intense feeling) words when his contestants lost, but they also needed more skill than being able to distinguish between green and salmon to win a penny. OK, maybe not the first £1,000, but everything after that.

My favourite quiz show is, of course, “The Weakest Link”. The prize is usually paltry thanks to the ineptitude of contestants. But, delightfully (OED: very pleasing), Anne Robinson doesn’t even pretend to like her contestants, let alone sympathise with them. A woman after my own heart then.