A benefit of this blog (at least for me — you’re on your own) is that people send comments on posts that compel me to think. A month ago a reader of a post on stale expressions, “Get rid of it,” asked what all the fuss is about cliches:

Interesting post, but why would you be upset about cliches? Especially the "war on terror"? we use the notion of "war" as a metaphor in so much of our everyday language, and you'd probably do well to look at a rather interesting read on the topic of war as a metaphor - "Metaphors we live by" by Lakoff & Johnson. I've also noted that in a number of your other posts, you also use cliche to effect. Style guides are just that, a guide (kinda like a serving suggestion in my opinion). Sociolinguists shudder to think of the rich cultural insights we could lose if we were to ban the use of the cliche! I say use them freely and frequently, so long as they don't interefere with the gist... (and make up as many new ones as you can along the way!)

This was refreshing. English majors, creative writers, prescriptivists and other members of the language tribe have been cautioned so frequently to avoid stock expressions that the injunction, mechanically repeated, remains unexamined. But to think about cliches and their value could lead to a clearer understanding of how people use language.

Think, for example, of all the metaphors and expressions from Shakespeare and the Authorized Version of the Bible that, fresh and original 400 years ago, have become the common coin of writing and speech. We do not live by bread alone. To every thing there is a season. All the world’s a stage. What’s past is prologue. These two sources occupy page after page of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and the words have become so familiar that people often do not recognize that they are quoting.

English is also full of buried metaphors — expressions of metaphoric origin that no longer carry a symbolic charge. We talk or write of the mouth of a river for the point at which it opens into a larger body of water, but the expression no longer carries the image of a mouth. We give an investment adviser free rein without thinking of him as a horse or ourselves as a rider.

Proverbs abound and are so familiar that they can be truncated. If someone is thinking of giving up on a sure thing for a chancy prospect, a bird in the hand is as much caution as one has to administer. Catchphrases tend to be ephemeral, but they function before they exhaust their span. The Seinfeld show has been off the air except for reruns for nine years, but a number of expressions it popularized have lingered, and they provide a useful shorthand for conversation. Yadda yadda yadda still does fine as a compressed equivalent of and then events followed in exactly the course you could have predicted.

All these elements account for a considerable volume of conversation and writing, and they are undeniably useful. Because people understand them, they add to clarity of discourse (except when the meanings deteriorate, as in the use of free reign by people removed from horse culture).

Particularly for journalists, who must cobble together (another buried metaphor; we’re not shoemakers) texts in a short time, the use of prefabricated phrases is unavoidable.

So cliche has an undeniable utility.

But here is where my function as an editor comes in. It’s not my job to regulate people’s speech or their private writing. I am concerned with writing for publication, where I have to ask whether a stock expression is a substitute for thought or so trite as to be useless. Clarity of meaning, though fundamental, is not the sole consideration. Is the writing also effective? Do trite expressions mar its effectiveness?

Peter Fisk, who appears to enjoy rolling the Apple of Discord into a conversation, challenged me: “John, if you would, please offer us a list of recognizable English expressions that are not to be rejected on the grounds of cliche, redundancy, or non-literal-mindedness.”

Not a trap I mean to fall into. Humbly obedient as ever to the writers’ stricture that I am not to substitute my wording for theirs, I merely point out that avoiding cliche is a task left to their powers of imagination and originality.