Cliches that stale, metaphors that die

I’m not what you might call politically aligned with the Daily Telegraph, but I believe its Letters Editor Christopher Howse and its Style-Guide Updater Richard Preston deserve praise for daring to criticise twenty-first-century popular jargon and cliché in their little book (Constable, 2007) She Literally Exploded.

It is daring, because there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who would retort “Oh, come off it. It’s only words for God’s sake. What a sad old so-and-so you must be ! Get a life” etc etc etc. To stand up and be counted (I hoped that phrase would be featured in the book, but it wasn’t) as one who cares about words and the English language is to draw down upon oneself the scorn not only (to continue the flow of cliché) of the man and woman in the street, including of course the ubiquitous Mr and Mrs Joe Public, but also of quite a number of progressive teachers and lecturers and writers who believe that the notion that a spoken statement or a printed paragraph can fairly be assessed for the quality of its composition is bunk.

Get the book, have yourself a good laugh (there’s an irksome idiom !) and be ashamed, be very ashamed (there goes another) if you recognise your own verbal follies in it. Mind you, a lot of the phrases that must now be rated as tedious clichés - such as ‘joined-up government’ and ‘re-invent the wheel’ and even ‘leave no stone unturned’ - were fresh and witty metaphors when they were young.

But witty metaphors, like ripe fruit, have a short shelf life and soon become wrinkled and unappetising. Even so, there are always people who poke around hopefully in the ‘expired sell-by date’ shelf in case they can find something they can use.

Cliches that stale, metaphors that die