I Gave This Post 110% Effort

All hail the cliche! Don’t get your knickers in a twist and don’t get too big for your britches (breeches too) young whippersnapper. Cliches are invaluable — valuable even (from Boston.com):

But here’s the thing: were any of them quite as good as “fit as a fiddle?” Time, to use a particularly sage cliché, will tell. If in 50 years an Amis-ism like “reduced to tears of barbaric nausea” is common currency, then he’ll have made the grade. Durable, easily handled, yet retaining somehow the flavor of its coinage, the classic cliché has fought philology to a standstill: it sticks and it stays, and not by accident.

Let’s consider the origin of the word. For 19th-century typesetters, a cliché was a piece of language encountered so often in the course of their work that it had earned its own printing plate – no need to reset the individual letters, just stamp that thing on the page and keep going. So the cliché was an object, and a useful one: a concrete unit of communication that minimized labor and sped things up. I imagine that a nice hardy cliché like “on its last legs” or “tempest in a teapot” does more or less the same thing inside our heads: one bash of the stamp, one neat little payload of meaning, and on we go. And speaking of tempests, how did we manage for so long without Sebastian Junger’s “perfect storm,” the epitome of a vigorous and helpful cliché? (“A perfect storm in a teapot,” on the other hand, is not a cliché. Yet.)

I see one or two hands going up out there. You sir – yes, you at the back, in the felt hat. What’s that? “Tempest in a teapot” isn’t a cliché, it’s an idiom? Ah, but there you hit upon the mystical super-cliché at the heart of cliché studies: No one can say with complete certainty what a cliché is. To me it might be a cliché, to you it’s an adage. Or a catchphrase. Or a salty bit of slang. The very earliest examples of cliché, if you look at them for long enough, seem about to turn into something else. From the Dark Ages: “hither and thither.” Cliché or not? And how about Homer’s “bite the dust”?

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