The Wit’s Guide To Cliché

Or, worn thoughts

Excerpt from “Our Three-Volume Novel at a Glance”, a rope-of-tropes by Priestman Atkinson from the Punch Almanack, 1885.

There is no greater fallen hero in The War Against Cliché than Martin Amis, the elfin king who based his entire literary pantheon on the idea of original expression.

“Whenever you write, ‘the heat was stifling’ or ‘she rummaged in her handbag,’ this is dead freight,” he said. “What cliché is, is herd writing, herd thinking, and herd feeling. And the writer, you’ve got to look for weight of voice and freshness, and make it your own. This is what writers do.”

His standards were so high as to induce nosebleeds, and I’m now worriedly re-reading the beginning of this sentence. Was that a cliché? Is everything a cliché? *looks in mirror, slowly touches face* Am I a cliché?

“Hush little bright line,
Don’t you cry,
You’ll be a cliché
By and by.”
— Fred Allen

Clichés become clichés through repetition, which is why there’s a wonderful irony in this 2013 Salon article that claims the worst cliché of all time is the one that says the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. Of course Einstein didn’t say it; Quote Investigator suggests it came from a twelve-step program. There’s also this great Randall Munroe comic response to it: “You’ve been quoting that cliché for years. Has it convinced anyone to change their mind yet?”

“A cliche begins as heartfelt and then its heart sinks.”
— Christopher Rick

Saying Amis was too stringent is like saying any restaurant with fewer than three Michelin stars isn’t good enough: An uncompromising pursuit of quality that makes it hard to function in the world. A crunch of the numbers suggests Amis’ viscerally entertaining intolerance of any prepackaged string of words is almost impossible to quantify. Ben Blatt’s entertaining 2017 book Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve attempts to rank authors by their propensity for stale phrasing. He uses as his guidebook The Dictionary of Clichés, a 2013 collection of 4,000 shopworn phrases. Stifling heat and rummaged handbags are not included. In a survey of 50 writers, James Patterson tops the cliché count with 160 per 100,000 words. Amusingly, recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize average 85 cliches per 100K, whereas the median rate of the top ten bestsellers is 118. Inexplicably, Blatt doesn’t offer a number for Amis’ oeuvre.

“Yesterday’s avant-garde experience is today’s chic and tomorrow’s clichés.”
— Richard Hofstadter

If, as Frank Kermode wrote in his LRB review of The War Against Cliché, the real issue is that cliches are “infallible symptoms of used thinking,” then what are quotations? This one’s too close to home to answer straight, so I’ll quote Lord Peter Wimsey: “I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking.”

“I had always assumed that cliché was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.”
— Philip Guedalla

To write headlines is to develop a hypersensitivity to cliche. Any event about dogs is the worst, as there is no other time that a modern English speaker will use the hackneyed term “doggone.” Similarly, no one ever has a Dickens of a time at anything other than a production of the Christmas Carol. I recall the hackiest hack who ever hacked complaining about his most despised headline trope: Forever Young for any article about Neil Young. But you know what? The guy has become a total cliché of an aging rock star, so let him have it.

“I realize that one man’s cliche can be another man’s conviction.”
— Adlai Stevenson

The late P.J. O’Rourke came around to worn thoughts in one of his final books, because at least they’re a sign of consensus. “A cliché may be overused and trite,” he wrote in None of My Business. “But a cliché represents an idea we all agree on — and there aren’t enough ideas we all agree on in America these days. Maybe America should be more clichéd. Maybe we should have a society, a business world, and a political system based on clichés…. Because people say the same thing over and over again doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” And he’s as right as rain.

“Let’s have some new clichés.”
— Samuel Goldwyn

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“The cliché is something that has nothing in reserve; that has no second meaning; that soon loses even its first meaning. It is an exploded squib; it is a spent bullet; it is a creature that has gasped out its little life in one pulse of publicity. When it is not born dead, it is born dying.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Dorothy Parker had a poodle named Cliché, because as she told a reporter in 1970, “the streets are carpeted with black French poodles.” These days, it’s a great name for a Labradoodle. And next week?

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If you send me money for this newsletter, I’ll send you gifts in the mail! That included Riposte Cards, the glorious collection of 28 bespoke works of art commissioned over two years, and now Aphoristicks, a monthly snicker of a sticker going out to those of you kind enough to cover the postage. The first one:

I felt myself straining for originality in Issue No. 338 of Get Wit Quick, so here’s hoping it came off as not strained but original. Or if strained, strained like pasta. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Is there a fresh new way to ask you to tap the ❤️ below?