Cliches
“If you scorn what is trite,” a poet once said, “I warn you, go slow . . .”
As Sir Ernest Gowers says in Plain Words: Their ABC, a cliché is “a phrase whose aptness in a particular context when it was first invented has won it such popularity that it has become hackneyed, and is used without thought in contexts where it is no longer apt.” Every other authority agrees with that definition; but as Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, the disagreements begin when one authority gives examples of clichés.
About those disagreements, Roy Copperud says in American Usage and Style: The Consensus that they were “once described in verse”:
If you scorn what is trite
I warn you, go slow
For one man’s cliché
Is another’s bon mot
What Is a Cliché?
In A Dictionary of Clichés, Eric Partridge gives thousands of examples of clichés, classifying them under four headings:
1. Idioms that have become clichés (e.g., “far and wide,” “bag and baggage,” “fair and square”)
2. Other hackneyed phrases (e.g., “add insult to injury,” “as a matter of fact,” “the salt of the earth”)
