Stale, Fatigued, and Hushed

Even though it is fairly common for writers to disparage clichés, it is rare for writers to explain that disparagement.

San Francisco 2012

In the forward to Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliché, we have a preference that expands until it becomes a principle:

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.

Even though it is fairly common for writers to disparage clichés, it is rare for writers to explain that disparagement. What’s more typical is the repetition of an axiom: clichés are bad, so they must be resisted. No further justification or proposal is needed. But at least Amis prods us toward an exception in his description of a sentence that rejects cliché—with its freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice. And we can certainly agree that a stale, fatigued, and hushed sentence isn’t what anyone wants.

Plenty of writers, alas, are either unable or unwilling to venture too far from the comforts of cliché. And comfort is the right word—because a writer who is stuck in a tricky or confusing or dubious line discovers that searching for a distinctive, novel expression requires a bit of strain, especially once all those prepackaged and prearranged phrases start to emerge in the silence of a writers’s hesitation, at least that’s the rule of thumb, by and large, when writers try to think outside the box, because, at the end of the day, a writer can only put a line in the sand and be better than ever by knuckling down and banking on, to be honest with you, an ability to work the crowd and to work the room and to work on deadline, all which require working like a dog…

Slipping into the most convenient phrases also explains the glut of bureaucratic words in most speech—with bureaucratese its own species of cliché. When speed and efficiency and repetition is what’s prized you end up with shortcuts, slogans, and jargon: there’s no time for pondering when your tongue needs to keep flapping. So we finalize only after we prioritize and that helps us to drill down and unpack during our deep dive when we are getting back to basics, but we first must circle back and reach out and touch base before going forward, because all the big picture stuff comes down to the wire whenever we take the lead, which means that we always get worked up about visibility and whether we’re bringing to the table the best practices that will be the most impactful, or whether what we’re doing—we’re usually not quite sure—is actionable. Incidentally, we don’t do anything that’s alongside or nearby or close to because absolutely everything, for some reason, is now orthogonal.

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For my purposes the definition of cliché is quite expansive, though I obviously include all the typical phrases that pollute the contemporary air: in the clear, in the black, in the red, in your face, in the hot seat, in the bag, in a wink, in your dreams, in the cards, in a pickle, in over your head. But those are just the most recognizable examples, speech that’s hackneyed or predictable or filled with catch-phrases, the jumble of words spoken so often that they’re now unheard. If a cliché is an exhausted phrase, a phrase that’s weary from excessive use, then I would include in my expansive definition, too, any commonplace adjective that’s adjacent to a commonplace noun, any of those language chunks that wait on your tongue as you speak: when you look into a forest and hear the word dense, when you look at the sea and find yourself describing it as open or deep or vast, when you look at the desert and the word great or barren or, once again, vast appears in your mind. You’re grabbing chunks of language in these situations. You’re grabbing the first word that completes the thought, which is always the already-heard word, the well-worn word, the passionless word. So that clear (typically) goes with sky, good (sometimes) goes with dinner, and tedious (usually) goes with client.

Now don’t understand too quickly: the undergraduate method of description that shuns any terse or commonplace word for the more complicated and unknown word is not the solution. To describe a woman who enters a room as pulchritudinous and acuminous is, well, insufferable. It simply proves that you’ve managed to lift and flip through what must be a haggard thesaurus. We don’t need unnecessary opulence, that late-Versailles sentence style, all shimmer and prim and gloss without any notion of an actual reader. My expanded definition of cliché doesn’t simply need a little bit of formalwear before going out, as most commonplace phrases remain perfectly suitable for commonplace descriptions—hot coffee, hard slap, leisurely swim. Yet we shouldn’t pretend that a commonplace description comes with freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice. Grabbing a chunk of language for a phrase is to see and therefore describe what everyone else describes—which means that we’re not in the realm of literature.

It is easy to overlook that clichéd writing and speaking has a portentous quality because it results from predictable thinking. And there’s an inhuman aspect to that predictably: it is the outsourcing of your thoughts to your environment. The culture completes your sentences. The people around you create your phrases. The television and movies you watch start forming your words. When you’re in the middle of the sentence and a listener can anticipate the coming words just before they arrive, you’ve surrendered what is most human about you—your capacity to think anew, the manner in which you articulate your own emotions, any link between your words and your personality.

For most people, unfortunately, the strain of ensuring that their words conforms to their character feels too difficult, it feels too cumbersome, so what’s grasped, instead, is the first available cliché. Yet the most beautiful moment in any conversation comes in the hesitation or in the stutter when someone strains for just the right word. This isn’t the time to interrupt or distract or prod. In this pause you can hear a person searching for the precise word that matches the concept in their mind. In most situations, this moment is brief, hardly even noticeable, and, sadly, results in the grabbing of a cliché, in the easiest and quickest formulation, as the right word seems just too far away. But on some occasions you can sense the unveiling of a fresh, unexpected description, one that conforms, more than anything else, to the speaker. To listen closely in this moment is to inhabit another mind.