FIELD MANUAL OF ENGLISH CLICHÉS
(BEING THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE FOR ALL WORD-WATCHERS)



All but the mute among us are word-twitchers rushing to record in grubby exercise books any hackneyed phrase that happens to fly our way. Yet, unlike the ornithological, the ordinary-logical enthusiasts collect the least exotic, the most hackneyed phrases on the wing.

It must not be supposed, though, that any modicum of agreement subsists among them as to what constitutes a cliché. What, if anything, is there to distinguish it from an expression that is simply an idiom? - just as frequently used, but without the power to kill by boredom.

The word itself derives incidentally from the process of the stereotype: as the late eighteenth century matrix fell on the molten metal, its French inventors thought they heard it say cleash, so they named the resulting embossed plates clichés. By association, any mechanical reproduction came to be known as such.

So much for history, however, to whose voice we listen at our peril, missing the point about the past - that it is over and done with - and becoming second-rate copycats. If we do not mean our thinking to be cloned in this mechanistic sense, we should turn our attention to what the word means after being around for some two hundred years.

Take the following phrases: at the end of the day, in the fullness of time, ultimately, in due course, in the long run, by and by, sooner or later, in the final analysis and when all is said and done. They all mean much the same thing, but are they all clichés? Certainly not. And the ones that aren't - in due course, in the long run, sooner or later and by and by - say it just as repetitiously, yet at the same time more honestly and straightforwardly. The clichés worth collecting are slightly pretentious, smug and self-satisfied, in short, given to regarding themselves furtively in the mirror.

Hold on a minute! Webster's tells us that a cliché is 'a trite phrase or expression' and 'trite' it defines as 'lacking the freshness that evokes attention or interest'. In the long run would in that case qualify. And yet are dictionaries oracular? In this case I think not. If they were, any phrase that's been used a few billion times would be a cliché, and this would include at length and even the word eventually. That would be such a reductio ad absurdum that man, coat and cheese would also be included - indeed, almost the entire English language, apart from such hidden treasures as dithyrambic.

The bottom line is this: a cliché in the mouth is worth ten in the dictionary. At the end of the day we must stand up and be counted, putting our money where our mouth is. If our platform is the deterrent effect of verbal chain reactions, we must not raise the spectre of reciprocal annihilation. To do so would be to open the floodgates of war, and that is the very time we need to raise our nuclear umbrellas.

Clichés often set out with good intentions. Ariel sang:

         Nothing of him that doth fade
        But doth suffer a sea change
        Into something rich and strange.

and that was fair enough, but every political hack that mimics this fairy adds a dull weight to the phrase till even when we meet it in Shakespeare we are bound to shudder.

Equally, the first man, woman or child to say 'in this day and age' used a rather sugared rhetoric but one without the self-important emphasis the phrase has accrued. And during the development of any cliché, those who become offended by its clowning mannerism undergo a spectrum of emotions from reluctant admiration through resentment to a kind of bitter laughter.

Only when laughter is directed at this shadow-language can it be frankly comical, as when we read in Geoffrey Taylor's 'Cruel, Clever Cat':

        Sally, having swallowed cheese,
        Directs down holes the scented breeze
        Enticing thus with baited breath
        Nice mice to an untimely death.

Yet there is final spectral revulsion when clichés are used in all seriousness.

So forget about dictionaries. In common sense we know something must have been left out of the definition. And it is what I have called the cliché's pretentiousness. The voice takes on a Churchillian timbre, the lower lip pouts, and we put a proud boot on the flank of the words we've slaughtered. As we say 'at the end of the day' - again and yet again -, the lip may simply twitch, the pitch descend a mere semitone (even pomposity can become a habit), but these shifts are there - if only subliminally. This is what it comes down to when all is said and done.