For the past couple months I’ve had in mind to write something here on the subject of clichés, and a small flurry of related Cacophany posts this past week—addressing academic title-clichés, the significance of particular idioms, insecure students mired in “ingrained phrases,” and the sputtering flame of life-of-the-mind idealism—make it plain to me that this is the appointed time to do so.  The cosmos seems to have arranged it.

The original impetus for writing in this case is humble enough.  I don’t have any grand or incisive thoughts on the matter; I just have a pair of battered, cherished paperback cliché dictionaries.  (They share a shelf next to a purple thesaurus—“revised and updated for the 1990s!”—and a rhyming dictionary, both relics from high school.  I love such reference books, especially when they’re portable, idiosyncratic, and cheap, as are all of the above.)  I also can’t resist mentioning another more recent prompt, the glorious cliché-collage that is the The Karate Kid (1984) soundtrack standout, “You’re the Best,” by Joe Esposito.  Several years ago, a friend of mine burned the song for me, but I assumed it was long lost until I heard it last week, to my great joy,  in some new sports-related commercial.  Check it out, scoring some primo “sweep-the-leg-Johnny” footage:

(And glance over here, to see a version with printed lyrics.)

Returning to the books, though: over the five or so years that I’ve had the cliché treasuries, I have thumbed through them a great deal, but I only recently got around to reading their editorial introductions.  Although both books boast about 2,000 entries and take similar approaches (citing the derivations of their idioms and phrases), the editors stand in almost comic opposition in their respective orientations to the subject of clichés, their sense of why one ought to consult such a dictionary at all.

A Dictionary of Clichés, was compiled by one Eric Partridge and published in 1940.  Its cover announces the book’s implicit purpose: “An entertaining and highly useful compilation of all the well worn phrases better left unsaid!”  Partridge’s eight page introduction corroborates this unqualified view of clichés as a sort of pestilence in language.  His fundamental definition of the term begins simply and soundly enough but then takes on a stern, didactic, even scolding tone: “A cliché is an outworn commonplace; a phrase, or short sentence, that has become so hackneyed that careful speakers and scrupulous writers shrink from it because they feel that its use is an insult to the intelligence of their audience or public” (2).  The categories Partridge elaborates—idioms, stock phrases that serve as counters, foreign words or phrases, quotations from literature—are helpful, as are the myriad examples he offers for each category and sub-category, but behind the careful scholarship we keep feeling the frowning, contemptuous face of the crabby scholar.  Of clichés in general, he laments, with a histrionic sigh, that “[t]heir ubiquity is remarkable and rather frightening” (2).  He then argues his view of what tends to cause such a swarming infestation of clichés:  “A half-education—that snare of the half-baked and ready-made—accounts for many: an uncultured, little-reading person seeks a stock phrase and thinks it apt and smart” (2).  Ostensibly, Partridge here is indicting education itself, as a flawed system or philosophy, but his language betrays an undisguised scorn for the victims of such a system, “the half-educated” (per his own notion of what that means, of course).  This scorn comes to the surface when Partridge characterizes certain overused quotations as “nauseating” (2).

By way of providing a quick, sharp distinction, I turn abruptly to James Rogers’ The Dictionary of Clichés (upping the ante with the definite article!), which first appeared in 1985.  His book’s cover also has an exclamatory appeal to would-be readers, but note the different value invoked: “If you wonder about the origins of all those old saws—from first blush to bite the dust—you’ll find this book the cat’s meow!”  The book’s implicit purpose has nothing to do with proper usage, just discovery and—as hinted at by the four idioms reflexively included in the note—fun.  Likewise, Rogers’s introduction, though only a page, gets right to the task of defending what is implied on the cover.  It begins:

“The cliché has a bad name as an overworked and therefore banal expression.  Spoken or written by someone who is not thinking much about what he is saying or writing, it usually upholds that reputation.  Among people who do pay attention to their phrasing, however, clichés can serve as the lubricant of language: summing up a point or a situation, easing a transition in thought, adding a seasoning of humor to a discourse.  Indeed, with a keen sense of where such a familiar saying comes from and what it means one can give his prose a piquant turn by embroidering a cliché…”

I confess to loving this concisely articulated position on the cliché question; it concedes the problem of thoughtless, stock word-use, but takes a stance that is inflected equally by pragmatic and aesthetic (even erotic!) views of what might be broadly called “expressions.” I confess also, as I ought to, in fairness, to having a Partridge-like gag reflex for the glib, jargon-y, sentimental, pretentious, contrived verbiage that seems to overrun so much of the popular media as well as, in more rarefied forms, academic spheres.  I am especially disgusted by the words and phrases I find myself using, in all contexts, again and again—my own stock of too-habitual code words and connectors. Ugh.  This is all to say that I understand where Partridge and many teachers of communication are coming from when they officially wage war on all that is classed as “cliché.”  I heartily concur with the basic concern.  In our own words and those of students we work with, we should be vigilant of thoughtless language, empty ostentation, and hazy, handed-down ideas—all of which deaden or foreclose on thinking rather than stimulate it—but this need not amount to a hunt-and-extirpate approach to supposedly diseased elements.  Commonplace expressions, buzzy terms, colloquialisms, overused constructions, and obscure idioms—these should be attended to more scrupulously, not thrown out altogether.  Many of them are just malleable “ways of saying” a thing.  Thus when cliches are addressed in conscientious and complex ways—adapted, subverted, riffed on, interrogated, delved into (see Stamatina’s post for a case-in-point)—they can actually enrich communication and thinking.  The selective, canny reworking of commonplaces enlivens what might otherwise just be mere, thus dead, counters.

My own hope, then, my little shred of idealism on the matter at hand, runs in an Emersonian direction.  In “Self-Reliance,” he argues: “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.  It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character” (263).  The chief admonitions here are not inconsistency or non-conformity for their own sakes, but an awareness that certain usages will necessarily become dead to me.  I have to creatively revamp those worn usages or else find new ones, in order to keep language animated, that is, forceful, in my life.   I insist on having it both ways with clichés.  Insofar as manipulative advertisers, glib pundits, and garrulous peers barrage us with repetitive, numbing language, yes, we vigilantly parse and vigorously resist the dead and deadening stuff.  But we can learn (thus also teach) how to negotiate the various clichéd elements in play without scorning them; we can thoughtfully find and use what is truly expressive in “expressions” without succumbing to idiotic (nauseating) parroting.