Cliches

[Timothy Mason]

The use of the term 'cliché' in the Cobuild sense is also extant in 
French, although more rare - perhaps because its use to refer to a 
photograph or its negative is extremely common (see Le Robert 
"Dictionnaire culturel en langue française'). Nevertheless, Gide once 
wrote 'Ce qui vous vient d'abord et naturellement à l'esprit, ce sont 
des lieux commons, des clichés ...' and Max Jacob noted that "Le cliché 
est un most de passe commode en conversation pour se passer de sentir."

The implication of Gide's formula is that when the language speaks you, 
it often does so through the cliché. It takes an effort to speak 
otherwise. Jacob draws a parallel between the cliché and Kitsch.

Although this may annoy some linguistic democrats, and one may indeed 
invoke Summer's idea of 'censure', (or hold that one man's cliché is 
another's eternal truth), suggesting that what is interesting is how and 
when people play the cliché card (You have just used a cliché, go 
straight to prison, do not collect $200), it seems worth hanging on to 
the idea that in many cases speakers or writers simply grab the next 
available complex token and sling it down with little thought as to 
what, if anything, is being said. Most of us are, most of the time, 
creatures of habitus.

Or, to quote the well-known philosopher of language, Terry Pratchett, 
"clichés are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of language."

Best wishes

Timothy Mason
http://timothyjpmason.com/wordpress/