On Cliche

There’s a passage at the beginning of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct about what a miracle it is that writers can implant ideas, images, and feelings inside their readers’ heads, just through words on a page. He tells a couple stories about to illustrate the point. Since I don’t have the book with me, I’ll just make up my own.

Oscar purposely chose for his team to attack the goal at the far end of the field where Alison and her friends always sat in the shade, giggling louder whenever a boy approached.

Of course the terra cotta porcupine was disappointed that the giraffe with multi-colored spots had rejected her invitation to tea, but frankly, she felt more comfortable with Jamie, and if there was ever a time to be comfortable, it was at tea.

It works even with kind of nonsensical sentences that probably no one has written before. In fact, I’ve only noticed two exceptions to this (I’m sure there are many more I’m not thinking of): mildly complicated sci-fi/fantasy names and cliches. If the pronunciation of a name is not immediately obvious to me, I’m liable to read it as Kv-[thatguy] or G– J-[thatpoison]. While not ideal, I think this actually aids immersion and comprehension. It would be even worse if I got totally tripped up at each mention of a word I couldn’t pronounce.

Far worse are cliches which I often read as nerves of [cliche] or red as a [cliche] which is about as far from the desired effect as writing the word “red” all over a fence is from painting it. I don’t see a red fence. I imagine that you want me to think the fence is red.

The other issue with cliches is that, even if they work as imagery, there’s a good chance that they don’t actually mean the correct thing. That is, if you’re writing about a red fence and you lazily compared it to a rose because your teacher said you should use more imagery, there’s a good chance that the fence isn’t even rosy red at all. It could be that the fence is fire-engine red or blood red or wine red or rust red, and depending on the context and the story, all of those could mean very different things.

Now you might get the impression that this means I hate cliches, undeniable pedant that I am. Actually the way that I think of cliches is that they are packages that hold the most basic, commonly agreed upon truths about the world that we have desensitized ourselves to through overuse. Which means that they are always ripe for rediscovery. On the rare occasion when you see a cliche unmasked, it becomes a revelatory experience. “Oh! Because cucumbers are cool!”

Although I haven’t mentioned it yet, I think the same holds for cliched advice, probably to an even greater extent. My favorite advice is “be yourself” which is hampered by the fact that is is most commonly used in bad coming-of-age movies as something the out-of-touch adult says to the angsty teen who has never been less sure of their own identity. But when you stop to think about it, it’s sort of the most insane, nonsensical advice you could think of. How could you possibly not be yourself? What if you don’t like yourself? Then shouldn’t you try to be someone else? What if you do change? Would you still be yourself? It’s the kind of advice you could spend a lifetime meditating on. I think there must be some shaggy dog anti-joke about a guy who goes on a long pilgrimage to see a reclusive guru and only gets the advice, “Be yourself.”