Everyone's a cliche

At least sometimes

I have always loved cliches. An English teacher in high school warned me that I overused them in my writing, naming me The Queen of Cliches.

The title hurt.

I believe that I took one right, and two wrong, lessons from that experience.

The right one? That hauling out a well known expression as a shortcut for actually thinking about what I’m writing is lazy on my side, and boring for readers.

And the wrong ones?

First, that I was somehow a uniquely cliche as a person. I mean, in our culture, who wants to be a boring cliche, let alone the queen of them?

Life since high school has helped me understand that the ways we are like others can be good. It would be radically isolating to be totally different from everyone else—we connect over both the foibles and the strengths we share with the people around us.

However, professionally, I’ve spent a lot of time since then trying to think up things that no one has ever said or done before to earn permission to share what I’m thinking…with profoundly limited success.

This makes it very difficult to hit ‘publish’ on my writing. I know that someone out there on the internet has already said at least part, if not all, of what I’m sharing. Why bother if it’s not a never-before-seen insight? Or if it’s not said with one-of-a-kind poetry? I worry that people will think I’m copying rather than doing the work.

And as much as that weird hitch stinks, I think the second wrong lesson I took was the more limiting one—and that was that cliches themselves don’t have any value.

Cliches are ideas that have survived Darwin-style, against others and over time. They stick around because they cut to the heart of a topic (yes, i see what i did there). They’re easy to remember so that we can hang on to them in the moments that we need them. They can be polished nuggets of wisdom or shared experiences. Their longevity means that though they are not necessarily always true, they are always worth considering.

I started thinking about cliches again because of our current meme-culture. It seems like memes and cliches are related, right? Both spread throughout our culture with a life of their own. Both capture big ideas with little cognitive load/word count. Both seem to apply to so many things we experience. Both are overused. But memes are beloved (for now, at least) and cliches are not.

Why is that?

Maybe it’s because internet memes are new and teachers don’t see them overused yet. A couple of generations from now, students might be warned against them. Maybe it’s because the meme captures a moment, or a feeling, without containing a lesson in the way many cliches do.

(Ooh! This is making me think I should look up Polonius, from Romeo and Juliet. I won’t do that now, because I promised myself I’d hit send on this in the next few minutes. But I will add to this post later if the reference adds anything.)

I’ll wrap this up here without offering an answer, because I don’t actually have one. This is just something I’m thinking about. If you have an idea, though, I’d love to hear it.