Jan 9, 2015 01:05 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/books/...clich.html
EXCERPT: [...] Usually clichés are used correctly and unthinkingly. So correctly and unthinkingly that mostly we don’t hear them, especially when we say them ourselves. The ways in which canned speech — even the can is now canned! — obstructs thinking, obscures evil and turns us into unknowing automatons have been very intelligently and thoroughly considered already: George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and George Carlin’s comedy sketch on “shell shock” (about how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue” became “operational exhaustion” became “post-traumatic stress disorder”) are particularly precise and witty. If you are looking for important thinking about cliché, I would go look at either of those pieces before reading the rest of this column. The Carlin bit is about euphemisms, but any popular euphemism is as much a cliché as linguine is pasta.
I can, however, think of one minor point about cliché that fits well into this narrow space. Clichés are like the old talismans dug up at an archaeological site. They often endure even when the times and places that produced them have passed on. When, for example, did we start to say “passed on”? When did glory start showing up in blazes and majorities become vast? When did war become something we wage? When did social commentary so often become searing, and was it around the same time that a certain demographic took a fancy to seared scallops? Why is lyrical something we wax, and why is a whip something we want to be as smart as? At some point someone’s goat was got, someone’s envelope was pushed and the mouth of someone’s gift horse was examined. None of these things happen any more. But we still use the old phrases, like hikers unrolling sleeping mats in the ancient temple at Petra....
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EXCERPT: [...] Clichés lend structure and ritual and glue: They are the subterranean passageways connecting one life to another. They obstruct alibis of complexity and exceptionality, various versions of the notion “It’s different for me.”
The question of clichés is partially a question of purpose and genre: Clichés might offer the consolation of company in a broken world; that doesn’t necessarily make them art. I’ve certainly felt my own resistance to clichés and their overhandled polish. But I’ve also come to recognize that I resist them for good reasons and bad ones: I resist them because I want to grant room for nuance and complexity; but I also resist them because I’m afraid of the fact that in certain basic ways my experience is just like everyone else’s, and I deeply want to believe in the exceptionality of my own interior life.
[...] Clichés work against us when they replace our tongues entirely, when the greeting card messages supplant our own. They work best when they link our singular experiences rather than efface them — when they function as dangling strings around which the rock candy of individual experience crystallizes....
EXCERPT: [...] Usually clichés are used correctly and unthinkingly. So correctly and unthinkingly that mostly we don’t hear them, especially when we say them ourselves. The ways in which canned speech — even the can is now canned! — obstructs thinking, obscures evil and turns us into unknowing automatons have been very intelligently and thoroughly considered already: George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and George Carlin’s comedy sketch on “shell shock” (about how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue” became “operational exhaustion” became “post-traumatic stress disorder”) are particularly precise and witty. If you are looking for important thinking about cliché, I would go look at either of those pieces before reading the rest of this column. The Carlin bit is about euphemisms, but any popular euphemism is as much a cliché as linguine is pasta.
I can, however, think of one minor point about cliché that fits well into this narrow space. Clichés are like the old talismans dug up at an archaeological site. They often endure even when the times and places that produced them have passed on. When, for example, did we start to say “passed on”? When did glory start showing up in blazes and majorities become vast? When did war become something we wage? When did social commentary so often become searing, and was it around the same time that a certain demographic took a fancy to seared scallops? Why is lyrical something we wax, and why is a whip something we want to be as smart as? At some point someone’s goat was got, someone’s envelope was pushed and the mouth of someone’s gift horse was examined. None of these things happen any more. But we still use the old phrases, like hikers unrolling sleeping mats in the ancient temple at Petra....
- - - - - -
EXCERPT: [...] Clichés lend structure and ritual and glue: They are the subterranean passageways connecting one life to another. They obstruct alibis of complexity and exceptionality, various versions of the notion “It’s different for me.”
The question of clichés is partially a question of purpose and genre: Clichés might offer the consolation of company in a broken world; that doesn’t necessarily make them art. I’ve certainly felt my own resistance to clichés and their overhandled polish. But I’ve also come to recognize that I resist them for good reasons and bad ones: I resist them because I want to grant room for nuance and complexity; but I also resist them because I’m afraid of the fact that in certain basic ways my experience is just like everyone else’s, and I deeply want to believe in the exceptionality of my own interior life.
[...] Clichés work against us when they replace our tongues entirely, when the greeting card messages supplant our own. They work best when they link our singular experiences rather than efface them — when they function as dangling strings around which the rock candy of individual experience crystallizes....
