Cliché is bad writing. Often, the most egregious examples appear in [[Engfish]] or [[corporate-speak]]. ("This app is a real _game changer_.") To paraphrase both [[Martin Amis]] and [[Northrop Frye]], it's the use of ready-made, unexamined constructions. It leads to generalities and, in the worst cases, **actual lies and untruths.** In this way, it's related to the [[fish in water]]. One antidote to cliché is the use [[concrete detail]]s. When writers talk about saying something "true," they're talking not talking about capital-T truths. (If you try for that, you'll find only more clichés.) Instead, they're talking about the use of specific, real experiences that, once woven together, produce a larger, coherent argument. ## People who've written about this Hey, please DM me on Twitter or something ([@refinedrobot](https://twitter.com/refinedrobot)) or email me if you have other sources, because I have issues with some ofl these writers and I wish I could find other ones that unpacked the idea this explicitly :( ### George Orwell The paradigmatic example of this is probably George Orwell's [[Orwell 1946 - Politics and the English Language|Politics and the English Language]]: > As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in ==gumming together long strips of words which have **already been set in order by someone else**==, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. ### Hannah Arendt [[Hannah Arendt]] in her book, [[Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)]]: > “To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was 'empty talk' – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, ==repeated word for word the **same stock phrases and self-invented clichés** (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché)== each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him” (ch. 3). ### Martin Amis [[Martin Amis]] wants to go to war with cliché. He writes, > “It occurs to you that _Ulysses_ is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations, fossilized metaphors – most notably those of Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds” ("War" 444) I find the definition of cliché as an "inherited, ready-made formulation" actually very useful. ### Northrop Frye Northrop Frye wrote about this in a 1986 article, [[Frye 1986 - Don't You Think It's Time to Start Thinking|Don't You Think It's Time to Start Thinking?]]: > The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking. It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness.