The War on Cliché

A brief history of tired phrases and the fools who fight them

Sunlight in a Cafeteria by Edward Hopper (1958)

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My university writing lecturer was a curious, combative chap born some 120 years too late. Composition class sprung into motion at exactly nine a.m. Doe-eyed stragglers, their breath forming on the locked door window, got used to time not as a fluid concept but as a cane across one’s knuckles. “Come back tomorrow,” he’d bark.

Professor Scotland held a cactus-like indifference to any concept, idea, perception, or entity resident outside of his beloved English Language.

We’d hand in our typed-up compositions and await punishment. Our papers, slashed in Sharpie Red expletives and threats, invited scorn. “This is laughable.” When harassing our pathetic offerings, Scotland raged as if witnessing a vandal smash the window and ransack the words on the page.

Whether it was Stockholm Syndrome, I am unsure. But we grew to love and revere our tormentor. His highest praise, a tightly composed “Not bad,” provoked peals of muted ecstasy.

Scotland revealed a suspicion of his mortality only when discussing cliché. “One should avoid all clichés like the plague,” he’d quip, as if revealing occult secrets. We’d laugh dutifully, like North Korean schoolgirls at a state parade.

Whenever I hear a cliché or tired expression, my mind reaches for the machete strapped to its belt. “Not bad…” is still the highest accolade my work will ever earn. As James Thurber put it, “I have never written more than a dozen pieces that I thought could not be improved. Most writers who are any good have this belief about their work.”

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Scotland’s quip, to avoid cliché like the plague, long ago joined the leprous ranks of ‘no pain, no gain’ and the legions of mummified expressions. His wilted witticism was once the mark of originality and high wit. Now it is the unfailing symptom of linguistic sclerosis.

The cliché is often tragic. It is the high school superstar athlete struck down by a cruel, muscle-wasting disease. What once gloried in peals of admiration now provokes pity.

Why we loathe cliché

To recoil at a cliché is instinctive. Why do we loathe cliché? What about cliché prompts even the most fair-minded of flowers into spasms of contempt? Perhaps it’s mere fatigue, accidie, or laziness. Perhaps it is all of these—or none at all. We loathe clichés because they are decayed truths, yet we cannot escape them—and perhaps we shouldn’t try.

Is it the entitlement on display? The cliché peddler knows his expression to be cliched. He’s rudely assuming you don’t. Our derision, then, counters his sly, conniving ways. Does he really think we aren’t too hot on the fruitful phrase and the fallow expression?

The cliché-monger commits intellectual embezzlement. He banks the interest of originality whilst paying none of the principal. And he knows it. He’s stealing the valour of its creator and hoping vainly to slide this pillage past your patience. The guilt stretches across his lips as the tired phrase seeps between his teeth.

He studies your reaction. If met with disgust, he rolls his eyes. Just kidding! If you say nothing, or worse—humour his thievery—he basks in stolen applause.

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Perhaps there are cultural differences here. But British people seldom let a cliché escape without breaking a pint glass over its head. We err on the side of disgust. Cliché-mongers try to—and fail—to inherit the wit of the originator. Humane and intelligent people understand the civilisational stakes here. We must recognise the fraud and loathe it accordingly.

Kissing Cousins

The cliché has the kind of proletarian relations one avoids at family gatherings, at least until one hears those unmistakable chopping-snorting sounds in the men’s toilets.

That relation is the inspirational post. They are the bootlegged DVDs of language. ‘Live laugh love’ decorates the homes and shoulder blades of those who do none of the three. Doubtless, the worst person you have ever met posts on Instagram: ‘Be yourself, everyone else is taken.’ I’d bet that Oscar Wilde, high priest of the witty phrase, has much to say about his work tattooed above a hairy, sunburnt nipple.

Inspirational posts invite the same scorn as the cliché. Again, the poster commits intellectual property theft on a scale so shameless it would make Xi Jinping blush.

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In Defence of Cliché

The very definition of cliché invites accusations of cliché. Julia Cresswell, writing in The Penguin Dictionary of Clichés, admits defeat. The difficulty in distinguishing the cliché from the idiom or the stock phrase leads her to concede: “The key element in what makes an expression a cliché must be over-use.”

This is no doubt helpful. And yet, who defines ‘over-use,’? To borrow a Juvenal, who will watch the watchers?

Martin Amis waged a guerilla war on cliché. For Amis, “cliché was where language goes to die.” Ironically, ‘where X goes to die’ could qualify as cliché.

Perhaps we need a looser definition. A cliché is like a good joke or worthy point one hears from someone one does not like. It has merit. The person saying it does not. Hence they sully the phrase like an oil-slicked dove.

Amis loathed cliché but fought for its necessity. Language needs cliché and idiom like fashion needs staple pieces. After all, language is ‘ever-evolving’—a cliché which I loathe. ‘It’s almost cliché to say this,’ has itself degraded into cliché. What about “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” Is that a tired cliché or a grim truth?

Despite its grubby reputation, cliché is the compost of language: dead matter from which new witticisms and insights grow.

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Accepting our Fate

This raises a disturbing question: is it possible to avoid cliché entirely? The uncomfortable truth is cliché is inevitable. Today’s witticism is tomorrow’s eye-roll.

If we must live with cliché, let us at least recognise it, mock it, and—when necessary—upcycle it into something worthy.

Perhaps the real cliché is the war on cliché itself—a war without end, and one only a fool would wage. So, reader, I leave you with this: It is what it is.

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