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. All these, and more, also appeared in Richard Preston and Christopher Howse’s infuriating phrasebook called She Literally Exploded (2007). We all agree that they are annoying. My husband throws his slippers at the radio when he hears such things on Today. Mr Rentoul looks too serious to lob slippers, even if he regards them as politically acceptable items of footwear. You never know.
What he doesn’t like is stupid prose that is satisfied with piling up dull observations. One phrase he singles out, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ is a second-hand remark that has been stale since about 1993, he reckons, the year after it was used (in the form the economy, stupid) by Bill Clinton’s campaign manager. Now, Mr Rentoul hopes, ‘it seems to be on the wane’. On the wane? Isn’t that a cliché? A cliché is a dead metaphor. On the wane is a metaphor taken from the phases of the moon. It is as dead as the Sea of Tranquillity. But I don’t mind.
The stock objection to a cliché is that it is stereotype that people lazily reach for. The image is from the literal meaning of cliché in French: ‘a cast obtained by letting a matrix fall face downward upon a surface of molten metal on the point of cooling, called in English type-foundries “dabbing”.’ So cliché is a cliché really, a dead metaphor taken from printing. You could call a cliché a dab if you wanted. It would be a fresh metaphor — but no one would know what you meant.
It isn’t ‘lazy’ to reach for a stereotype, any more than it is lazy to use a glottal stop instead of a ‘t’. A glottal stop takes quite as much effort, and a stereotype is like any other piece of type that you reach for. Without it you cannot make up the page. Without dead metaphors we cannot speak, depend upon it.
Depend is a dead metaphor. The word means ‘to hang down’, but we hardly think of the literal meaning when we say a car is dependable. Mr Rentoul mentions that Henry Fowler thought it puerile to object to the phrase under the circumstances, rather than in the circumstances. But Fowler could only be right if the metaphor of circumstare, ‘to stand around’, is a dead one.
For in a world where all clichés are banned, poetry would die. Poets may use fresh metaphors, but it is the essence of poetry to be learnt off by heart. The fresh metaphor thus becomes utterly familiar. Moreover, in poetry like Homer’s ready-made epithets are reached for — lazily if you like, but automatically for sure. Any catechism of cliché could not only ask, with Myles na gCopaleen, ‘When things are few, what also are they?’ (far between), but also, ‘How is Achilles equipped with extremities? He is footed. And is there a characteristic, also associated with a species of bird, that qualifies this footedness? Yes, swift.’
We are told that Homeric epithets come from the oral technique of composition. Yet they also have an effect that is powerful in a special way. They are gnomic, asserting a truth about the way things are, just as fire is burning, ice cold. This is the stuff of proverbs. In saying, ‘A burnt child fears the fire’, we do not worry that it has been said before. That is the point.
It is possible to be tedious with gnomic saws. ‘Don’t care was made to care,’ is not always an exciting remark. But Jonathan Swift’s dialogues of Polite Conversation, which were compiled to mock empty-headed prattlers, now exert a pleasing fascination (‘Did you ever see the like?’ ‘Never, but at a wedding.’ ‘Is it certain that Sir John is dead?’ ‘Yes, or else he’s sadly wrong’d, for they have buried him.’)
So let’s not ban clichés, which is like trying to ban gravity or fashion. For to exclaim ‘Oh! My! God!’ is annoying not because it is a cliché but because it is a token of membership of a confederacy of dunces, like looting from JD Sports. Instead let’s mock dullness, pretension, groupthink, dishonesty. Look after the meaning and the medium is your oyster.
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