Sound Familiar?

“A cliché on your face? Whatever do you mean, Johnny?”

“A cliché,” he answers, “you know, a tired expression.”

Johnny nailed it: Clichés are tired expressions. Their fatigue comes from their having been overused, and often badly used. They are words and phrases that no longer carry much meaning and have even less force. They reveal mental laziness on the part of those who use them. They are despoilers of style. Using clichés is like dressing out of the dirty-laundry bag—someone else’s dirty-laundry bag.

Who is to say what is a cliché? Some clichés are obvious, of course, like throwing that baby out with the bathwater or watching someone like a hawk. But others are in doubt. Has “boots on the ground” now achieved cliché status? Has “go-to guy” arrived there? And what about “take,” as in “what’s your take on the subject?” Until recently, a cliché was what arbiters of language claimed it was, and, being arbiters, they could sometimes be arbitrary.

This has now changed, owing to modern computational lexicography, which allows linguists to gather statistical evidence on how frequently words and phrases are used, and in what combinations, and by whom, and in what settings. Overuse alone does not always mark a cliché. According to Orin Hargraves, a lecturer in linguistics who works on computational analysis of language at the University of Colorado, “It is often misapplication, rather than frequency of application, that leads to the perception of a phrase as a cliché.” In It’s Been Said Before, Hargraves sets out as his criteria for clichés that 

Clichés can, of course, be clever, and some contain a fairly high truth quotient. Many clichés began life as dazzling metaphors or scintillating similes. The Bible and Shakespeare, an old joke has it, are magnificent, but contain way too many clichés. Clichés can also be useful for spinning off, reversing, and doubling back on, for comic results. Maurice Bowra once remarked that an overly friendly Oxford don had given him “the warm shoulder.” Philip Larkin, after leaving his first librarian job in the provincial town of Wellington, which he described as “a hole of toads’ turds,” wrote, “I’d have missed it for anything.” I have been known sometimes to introduce my wife as my “better three quarters.”

As Hargraves acknowledges, clichés are long-lived. They offer ready refuge to the unoriginal. Speakers find them useful in connecting with audiences. He notes: “Many, perhaps most, writers must resort to cliché from time to time in order to connect with their readers in a way that formal language, often barren of cliché, does not allow them to do.” Is it a cliché to say that clichés are always ready to hand? Whether it is or not, they are.

Orin Hargraves is, by self-designation, a “cliché-killer,” out to divest the English language of as many clichés as possible by highlighting their illogic and ridiculing their stupidity. Excellent cliché hitman though he is, he realizes that the job cannot be done with anything like thoroughness and that most clichés will live on; he even believes that some clichés deserve to do so, if only because they can put people at ease by their informality and familiarity. “None of these judicious uses of cliché,” he writes, “if kept in check, is objectionable.” He distinguishes between clichés and proverbs, and he does not regard as clichés those idioms that do the job of precise expression more economically than lengthier phrasing, among them “shed light,” “leaps and bounds,” and “part and parcel.” His larger intention here is to bring about a greater awareness of the inanity of most clichés and to point out “the detriment that they typically represent to effective communication.”

The great swamp in which clichés nest, it will surprise no one to learn, is journalism, which, Hargraves writes, “has been historically and continues to be the true home of the cliché.” As such, journalists are also the great vectors, or spreaders, of cliché. If anything, more clichés show up in contemporary journalism than ever before because of the increased absence at budget-restricted newspapers of that necessary drudge, the copy editor. Hargraves also finds the blogosphere to be “particularly rich in cliché today,” and for the same reason: want of editing. He doesn’t mention the Twitterverse, but given its need for quick and clipped communication, clichés to the tweeter are, as one might have said before reading Hargraves’s book, as meat and drink.

After its introductory chapters, It’s Been Said Before is organized into seven chapters, four by grammatical function (nominal, adverbial, adjectival, and predicate clichés) and three by semantic function (as framing devices, modifiers, and collocations). Within each of these chapters, clichés are listed in alphabetical order, followed by a core meaning of the cliché, usually three examples of it in use, and a brief paragraph about the cost of using the cliché. A chapter of afterthoughts closes out the book, beginning with its author’s acknowledgment that it would be a peculiar kind of reader who had read all that precedes it. I, as a reviewer, am, by duty, that peculiar reader; but Hargraves’s point here is to underscore that he has produced a volume best used as a work of reference. If a writer thinks he is striding into cliché country in his own work, he can consult this book’s index to see if a particular phrase is listed there, then turn to the appropriate page to determine why it has gained its shabby status as a cliché. 

The first thing a reading of It’s Been Said Before conveys is how pervasive are clichés. In the mine-filled field of language—where grammatical error, semantic imprecision, and misusage abound—clichés are buried everywhere. In the work of some fearless writers, cliché explosions go off in every paragraph, though these scribblers seem neither to notice nor to mind.

Although Hargraves has looked into thousands of clichés over the two years he spent studying them, he has assembled and dispatched (by my rough count) 517 notable clichés for this book. A few were new to me: “jump the shark,” for one; “shift the dynamic,” for another. A small handful of my own favorites are missing: “a teachable moment,” “a paradigm shift,” “totally awesome,” “a window of opportunity,” and the single word “fraught,” which, whenever I come upon it, makes me think of Fraughty the Snowman.

Hargraves is neither a belletrist nor a language curmudgeon. Not the least wisp of snobbery clings to his pages. He does not set out to reform the English language and its use. What he intends, he tells us in his final chapter, is to call to the attention of interested readers and writers the need to excise from prose those deposits of stale language that come in the form of clichés and that block, if they do not sometimes befuddle, clear communication. He wants his readers to “write mindfully”—mindful, that is, of when their own language is precise and lively and when wobbly and deadening. 

Orin Hargraves also happens to be an amusing man, never more so than when he is in sarcastic mode, slashing away at clichés. Some clichés, for Hargraves, are “swayback workhorses”; others come from “the fetid stew of clichédom.” In response to the cliché “the elephant in the room,” he writes: “Elephants in rooms outnumber elephants in Africa by nearly twenty to one.” Let us forget that “800-pound gorilla,” which, if found in the same room with one of those elephants, can make for a densely packed room and provide serious housekeeping problems. Of “meteoric rise,” he notes, with astronomy on his side, that meteors usually fall. “Slippery slope” he allows has the appeal of alliteration but not much else. He excoriates “bright eyed and bushy tailed” by remarking that it contains “a lot of syllables for a small idea.” Using the phrase “a whole host” is “a sure sign that you are running to the nearest exit from the theater of engaged thought.”

The cliché “for all intents and purposes” suffers from the people who use it not being able “to separate intents from purposes.” He notes that “totally overcome” is the “absolutely fantastic” of a younger generation. Of “sound the death knell,” he notes that the “poor little knell” is much overworked and that the cliché, if used at all, ought perhaps only to be used in the past tense. On “time to think outside the box” he writes that it is “time to think outside the box about ‘think outside the box.’ ”

Because Hargraves organizes his catalogues of clichés by function and not subject, there is no separate listing of the preponderance of clichés in certain fields. Sports clichés are one such field, though “sports clichés” might itself be a redundancy, for, deprived of their clichés, broadcasters and sportswriters would be out of work. Five prominent clichés that have their origins in sports that Hargraves notes are “game changer,” “on steroids,” “the whole nine yards,” “take it to the next level,” and “touch base.” A sixth is “ballpark figure,” which Hargraves doesn’t include. “Going forward” is not a cliché exclusive to sports—Hargraves cites it as “now irresistible to politicians, business spokespersons, and even sports journalists, all of whom use it in preference to a number of plainer expressions such as now, in the future, and from now on”—but athletes who have been caught doping, beating up wives or girlfriends, or toting guns all do seem to have one thing in common: the wish to put it all behind them and “just go forward.” 

The only directly political cliché that occurs in It’s Been Said Before is “staunch conservative/Republican.” If Orin Hargraves has a politics, he has kept his book free of them. Regarding this cliché, he notes that “instances of staunch conservative/Republican outnumber staunch liberals/Democrats by nearly four to one, suggesting that the users of these phrases are speaking or writing formulaically—or alternatively and not very persuasively, that liberals and Democrats are less steadfast in their principles and so do not merit the staunch label.” Another possibility—one I favor—is that the word “staunch” here really stands for unbending, if not fanatic. In this reading, conservatives and Republicans are staunch, while liberals and Democrats, more reasonably, are merely steady but flexible. 

Which brings to mind a pair of linked clichés from the years of the Ronald Reagan presidency, during which so many of Reagan’s budget items were “savage cuts” that had “chilling effects.” In those days, one couldn’t pick up the New York Times without finding those “savage cuts” causing yet more and more “chilling effects.” So many chilling effects were in the air that it seemed a mistake to read the Times without wearing gloves and a muffler lest one catch cold.

The attraction to clichés is akin to what H. W. Fowler called “vogue words,” which he defined as words that emerge “from obscurity, or even from nothingness or a merely potential and not actual existence, into sudden popularity.” Vogue words soon enough morph—is “morph” itself such a word?—into clichés. “Tipping point” is an example. Hargraves writes that “tipping points first came to light in considerable numbers in the 1960s and today people and situations reach them all the time,” adding that before the phrase came into vogue, “there were more straws breaking camels’ backs.” The word “outliers” is another vogue word headed on its way to the unhappy hunting ground of cliché country. Many such vogue words—which are really little more than new clichés—have been loosed upon the world through the books of the journalist-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell.

Outside the ken of It’s Been Said Before is the role that clichés play beyond the written or spoken word. Clichés directly affecting life also exist, exerting genuine pressure on people and often determining crucial decisions for them. For years, the term “middle class” had this kind of cliché standing, and what it stood for was dullness, safe-playing, a comfortable but empty existence, selling out. The reigning impulse for many people under the sway of the tyranny of this cliché was to avoid being, or even seeming, middle class, no matter how truly middle class they were. As we now know, without a solid middle class, and without large sections of the populace regularly ascending into it, the country is in jeopardy. 

“Midlife crisis” is another such cliché, fading perhaps a bit by now, but once explaining, and thereby half justifying, all sorts of stupid behavior, chiefly on the part of men, from buying red convertibles to taking up with women 30 years younger than themselves. “Reinventing oneself” is yet another, more contemporary, cliché, suggesting that one’s life can fairly easily be changed, quickly rendering one a new and happier person, as if human character were so plastic, so malleable.

The only way to ward off clichés in speech and writing, as Hargraves suggests, is to use your imagination and judgment. The same applies to clichés in life, with the added and sometimes painful necessity of consulting reality before being taken in by any of them.

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of A Literary Education and Other Essays.