Cliche

A constant dread I have is that I'll be caught with a cliche down around my ankles. Hackneyed phrases signal an amateur, immature, or a lazy writer. They abound with misspellings in blogs. Preparing blog entries can be a thoughtful, tedious process, or a spur-of-the-moment impulse to strike while the iron is hot. This is when a cliche creeps in.

Catch phrases, currently popular in hamburger advertising on TV, run in herds or come and go as fads, like teenage lingo. Cliches are more enduring. They become embedded in our hearing, in our minds. I think they burrow into our psyches and filter experience and ideas. They're dangerous in that way. You know what you're saying, but what am I hearing if you speak in cliches?

I seem to recall a creative writing teacher at Northwestern expounding that cliches, like Aesop's fables, contain a gem of truth, and that's why they live on. When cliches clash, I start to wonder. How many can you find in this entry?

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