The Case for Cliché

by G. Murphy Donovan (June 2012)

And prudence dictates that contemporaries seek and acknowledge what has been said or written before, not so much to avoid cliché of word or phrase; but, more importantly, not to create yet another pleonasm. Good writers often collect the adages of their predecessors; the Erasmus collection is the standard. An aphorism is a kind of compact poetry, a fusion of wit and wisdom. Some are clever, some are insightful, and some are just deadly. Some are all three. More than a few come in handy.

To be fair, words are never adequate to experience. And more words usually mean less meaning. But we read and write nonetheless. Of all words to choose from, English may be the best anyway; voluminous, expansive, and malleable. What of transient meaning or clichés? Clichés revel in repetition and an adage remembered is merely a reader’s homage.Serious or tedious words are often a kind of silent shouting. Anger or complexity is ever the enemy of education. Surely volume diminishes argument. Let Kafka, Wittgenstein, or the NY Review suffer for or about meaning, or the lack of it. And with Joyce or Hemingway, is it folk wisdom or just the whisky? Who cares?

An enduring bromide is a kind of rhetorical immortality also. What is immortality, if not memory and repetition? The ancients likened early Europe to “frogs around a pond.” The croakers are still with us. So is the pond. And so are the many riffs of remembered cliché makers. The ace of axioms reminds us that “brevity is the soul of wit.” An American cousin tunes the quill by saying that the difference between the right word and one that is nearly right is like the “difference between lightning and lightning bugs.”

Donovan writes frequently, with or without wit, about politics and national security.

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