The case for cliché

If I had neglected to brush my hair, my grandmother would say that I looked like a birch-broom in a fit. Untidy clothing made me look as though I had been pulled through a hedge backwards. If I appeared unhappy she would say that I had a face like a wet week. These similes, exaggerated and invariable, were so familiar that their metaphoric images scarcely registered. You could call them clichés. If so, they were clichés that went with my grandmother’s character, like her powder-compact, rain-mate and the mothball smell of her fur coat.

John Rentoul, the political journalist with the Independent on Sunday, has declared war on clichés in a little book called The Banned List (Elliott & Thompson, £8.99). The words he lists are only banned by him, so they thrive untroubled in the wider world like Japanese knotweed. (Am I allowed to liken things that spread to Japanese knotweed? Let me see. Yes, the first banned phrase beginning with J is job of work — a strange aversion, since the phrase has been in continuous use since 1557, and is indeed the earliest context in which the word job is recorded. To take against it now is like trying to ban the phrase a pair of trousers out of motives of economy.)

I think John Rentoul has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. We should have more clichés. They are in truth, as someone said in jest, the poetry of the people. Without clichés there are no proverbs, no shared references, and language itself is scarcely possible.

You may point out that for many a long year I have inveighed against cliché. In reality my hatred is for the wrong sort of cliché. I recognise some of those in Mr Rentoul’s little book: step change, pushing the envelope, pre-book, on a daily basis, ground-breaking, sing from the same hymn-sheet, iconic.