Cliches

[Larry Gorbet]

I am a little surprised that the discussion here 
of what clichés are seems to ignore for the most 
part actual usage of that word. Neither 
repetition nor popular cultural reference is 
remotely diagnostic of the kind of language use 
that is commonly referred to as "cliché".

I would put forth the (only) definition from the 
Collins COBUILD _English Dictionary for Advanced 
Learners_, a choice I make because the COBUILD 
definitions seem to do a *much* better job than 
traditional British or American dictionaries of 
capturing how words are actually used. If, 
however, most common traditional dictionaries are 
consulted, rather similar definitions are found. 
The COBUILD definition is:

"A cliché is an idea or phrase which has been 
used so much that it is no longer interesting or 
effective or no longer has much meaning."

The kinds of ritual, literary, or, for that 
matter, musical examples that have mostly been 
given in this thread fail the given criterion. 
Obviously many phrases occur in speech or writing 
much more frequently than many clichés but are 
*not* judged to be clichés. For example, in 
American English, the spoken phrases "took out 
the garbage", "you and I", and "worth it" are not 
clichés, but are more frequent than, say, "no 
pain, no gain", "today is the first day of the 
rest of your life", or "blow your own horn", 
which *are* clichés.

Though this is clearly not part of the folk 
definition of cliché, I suspect that what, in 
cognitive terms, underlies judgments that a 
phrase is a "cliché" is the notion of *over*use. 
That is, if we imagine the producer of a phrase 
searching (unconsciously, in general) for the 
particular words and phrases they will use to 
express their ideas, then we think they have 
produced a cliché if a certain expression shows 
up more frequently than (again, unconsciously) we 
feel that it would show up from the normal 
"encoding process" of language use. Its 
appearance is "suspicious" as the product of a 
"fair" search, just as someone's winning too 
often in a supposedly random drawing might be. 
The more evidently figurative or ornate an 
expression is, the more likely it is to be judged 
a cliché if used very frequently. Notice that by 
this kind of criterion, both ordinary, high 
frequency expressions that are motivated by 
simple aptness or conventional usage *and* 
unconventional but at least fairly original 
expressions would be excluded from being clichés.

- Larry

-- 
Larry Gorbet                         lgorbet at unm.edu
Anthropology & Linguistics Depts.    (505) 883-7378
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A.