Cliché Bingo

In today’s modern society our lives are being taken over by the humble cliché. Gird your loins and brace yourselves as I take you along the path of the ever-present over-used phrase…

Using clichés is a slippery slope. There are swings and roundabouts but at the end of the day we could talk about it until the cows come home, and then it’s downhill all the way. Avoiding clichés is just a mountain we all have to climb and getting it right is really an uphill struggle. Hearing them everywhere is the cross we have to bear. Ring-fencing this sacred cow puts us in the horns of a dilemma. It calls for a bit of blue sky thinking – a few new ideas to run up the flagpole, to see whether anyone salutes. We need to think outside the box and see the big picture if we’re going to avoid scoring a linguistic own goal. We should leave no stone unturned in our quest to make what we write a whole different ball game. We should make it a point of honour to make a hard and fast rule to be at loggerheads with clichés and close the door in their faces. They just don’t cut the mustard, and they never will – even in a month of Sundays they’ll leave you with a face like a wet weekend.

But what’s wrong with the humble cliché, I hear you cry? There are a lot of them out there – why not just grin and bear it and use them? They’re like an old friend to most of us and when we hear someone using them, we know where they’re coming from. Far be it from me to complain. Clichés can be just right. They can hit the nail on the head, indeed sometimes they really take the biscuit. If we avoid them from the word go, we might end up back at square one. Maybe we should avoid them like the plague, but on the other hand if we think big, they can be just what the doctor ordered. What we write is a game of two halves and we have to think of the other guy – the reader. There has to be a level playing field so that we don’t build a wall between what we write and what the other guy reads. If we lose the clichés we can shift the goal posts and the scales can fall from his eyes. Then he won’t understand. There’s no I in team and this writing business is a two-way street. It’s an open-door process and we should be driving up the standards of what we write in a results-orientated communication process. Year on year, we should be communicating more effectively and if we have to use the odd cliché to do this, then so be it. There is, after all, ample proof that language is a bit of a curate’s egg, or a hit and miss affair. We have to work like Trojans to marshal our talents and make the person we’re talking to feel over the moon because we’ve made our meaning as plain as the nose on his face.

I’m not going to get on my horse here. I’ve got no axe to grind with clichés. They don’t put my nose out of joint, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Sometimes a cliché is right as rain and you can find the writing is on the wall, and not using it would just be a red herring. You try your damnedest to toe the line but it’s just not happening. So you throw in the towel and use the cliché and you feel you’re really getting through to someone and then you feel like you’re on top of the world and on cloud nine, where the craic is ninety. You feel like you’re really getting somewhere and you just want to bottle that moment and hold that thought. If you’d stuck to your guns you’d only have shot yourself in the foot. And the other guy wouldn’t have been able to make head or tail of what you had written so he’d have felt like stabbing you in the back. Them’s the breaks and on days like this it just takes a moment of truth to shed a little light and make us face the music. Sometimes it takes a while for this to dawn on us, but when we’ve learned our lesson we just have to make a note of it and bite the bullet. You can’t have your cake and eat it, and you never miss the water till the well runs dry. Writing isn’t child’s play. Doing it right separates the men from the boys and trying to get it right means that a woman’s work is never done. But life’s like that – some you win, some you lose; you’ve got to take the good with the bad. When we write we just have to keep an eagle eye out for a golden opportunity to say something uniquely individual which will make a difference. Sometimes this will mean going back to the drawing board but we just have to try and try and try again, because life’s not a dress rehearsal and one day we’ll be six foot under and pushing up daisies. Then where will we be? Not writing, that’s for sure, and we’ve got to think about the legacy benefits of our life’s work. That idea really leaves us in a pickle because there’s not a man Jack of us who wants to be lost for words. Readers have the memory of a goldfish and we don’t want our words to be lost on the desert air. If no-one remembered what we’d written it would all have been a glorious waste of time and there’s no denying that all we really have when we write is a ghost of a chance that someone will get over the hurdles of what we’ve run past them and sit up and take notice of our dulcet tones.

And so, dear reader, never forget that writing well is no mean feat and not to be sneezed at, even if it’s all in a day’s work. We should rise to the occasion with open arms, taking it all in and taking everything on board as we set sail with our pens, which are mightier than the sword. The thing is though that there are horses for courses and we should always hedge our bets. You can take a horse to water but you can’t make him drink and we should bear this in mind when we think twice about what we’re writing, otherwise it will go in one ear and out the other. When all’s said and done it’s as broad as it’s long and you just have to roll with the punches and take one day at a time, putting one foot in front of the other and by no means running before you can walk. Always mince your words in case somebody makes you eat them after giving you a kick in the teeth.

In the heels of the hunt, every dog has his day and you can bet your bottom dollar that one day you’ll kick the bucket. In the run-up to that moment of truth, hope springs eternal and you’ve just got to push the envelope and make your voice heard. You might have to rack your brains 24/7 but it’s not rocket science to see that it’s a glass half full situation. You’ve got to get your reader singing from the same hymn sheet as you, or else the bottom line is that you’ll be stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, and no-one will be able to make head or tail of what you’ve written. Bear with me, even though it boggles the mind. Basically, this writing lark is literally awesome and it’s just such an amazing opportunity. You’ve just got to keep at it on an ongoing basis, but never lose sight of the fact that Rome wasn’t built in a day and always touch base with your reader. In the final analysis, it’s all well and good, and sooner or later you’ll get there in the end, because everything comes to him who waits.

I’ll cut to the chase. You’ve got to explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned in your quest to see the light. Once you wake up and smell the coffee, you’ll have a baptism of fire and even if you’re no spring chicken, you’ll find you’ve got what it takes. If you’re quick off the mark you’ll soon know the ropes and, even if you don’t give up the day job, you’ll soon find your words of wisdom will go that extra mile.

Mark my words.

Soul-destroying, isn’t it?

(Originally written September 2007)