Mind your language | 13 August 2011

‘Who,’ I wondered to myself as I folded away my husband’s pyjamas, which he’d left on the hall floor (why the hall floor?), ‘is this woman sprinkling glottal stops like currants into a Welsh pancake mix and between each one inserting a cliché?’

It was Sally Bercow, the cheery wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons. She was on Today only for a minute and a half, so wasted no time in setting the tone by reminding us that Napoleon said the English were a nation of shopkeepers. Then we were told that ‘our high streets are fast approaching their sell-by date’. Do they have sell-by dates? There was no time to resolve this doubt, for the monologue was beginning to resemble a Spectator competition inviting readers to squash as many clichés as possible into a short piece of prose. They began to come in twos with baffling logical connection: ‘Get over it — it’s not rocket science.’

In the middle of one fig-roll of clichés (brave the rain, reinvent itself, bring on the cafés and even that politician’s giveaway, to be honest) came a nut-cluster to catch those allergic to chestnuts: wake up and smell the coffee. I can’t remember having heard that used in earnest. It lives as an ironic formula, often varied for comic effect. ‘Wake up and smell the Complan,’ wrote Judith Woods in a piece in the Telegraph recently about Gransnet, the senior version of Mumsnet. ‘Wake up and sell the coffee,’ ran a headline on a business article about the Costa Coffee chain.

The Oxford English Dictionary woke up and smelt this cliché in 2005, adding a clutch of quotations recording its use since 1943, and explaining that it was popularised by the American syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers, whose real name was Esther Pauline Friedman — and she reached her sell-by date in 2002, aged 84.