Cliche

I think when you are teaching students about cliches--I usually hear teachers in the faculty room disparaging student use of cliches--that you need to realize that students are just learning cliches, so technically they don't know that they are cliches.

Typical advice goes something like this, "You should avoid using a cliché in your writing like the plague. It's simply an expression that has become overused to the point it has lost the impact; such as 'avoid...like the plague.'"

I like what George's dad on Dead Like Me had to say to his poetry class about cliche. He said, "When you're suffering, truly suffering, it's the cliches that heal you. When I'm sad give me George Jones, or Willie Nelson. That's the brilliance of these sonnets. They state the obvious. Cliches are cliches because they are the things that have stuck to the wall. Our greatest arrogance is to believe that we are all special, because the truth is we are all unbelievably the same."

How do you define cliche? If there is a universal feeling, there is a cliche to go with it.

A cliche is not just something that lots of people say; It's something that lots of people say and it conveys some sort of idea or message. A cliche is, in other words, a metaphor characterized by its overuse.

The blogger at westegg says, "I have my own test to see if a phrase is a cliche or not. I read the first half of the sentence, then I ask myself, "do I just know (because everyone knows) how the sentence ends?" Someone recently submitted, "The gene pool could use a little chlorine." I knew this wasn't a cliche because when I say, "The gene pool could use what?" I don't know how to end the sentence."