I think that people are sometimes snobbish about language. For me, words and phrases are like clothes in a wardrobe. In terms of linguistic benefits, there are at least two possible results of having an education: you have more clothes in your wardrobe to choose from; and you may choose your garments with greater care and avoid embarrassment like turning up to a funeral in a swimming costume. Although using words inappropriately can jar, for example, using slang in a formal context or using the informal language of speech in formal written prose, there is nothing wrong with the words themselves. Swimming costumes are just swimming costumes, though convention dictates that they are best worn near water.
Despite this, there are, and always have been, those who sneer at certain kinds of language. In the film My Fair Lady, when the former Cockney flower girl, Elisa, is taken by her educator to the races, she passes the test for most of the time and manages to wear the more formal language that the upper middle classes would have used in that context at the time. However, when in her excitement she reverts to her natural speech and shouts out at a horse, “Carm orn Dover, mooove ur eyend!”, she is mortified to be caught wearing an inappropriate garment, and those around her are contemptuous of her language. But there is nothing wrong with her language - it communicates very well - even if some might argue that it is inappropriate in the context.
There have always been those who think that language has a standard and that people are constantly slipping from it. Some, with limited understanding of linguistics, argue that formal written prose is the standard and that informal speech is an inferior, sloppy, deviation from that. There are two things wrong with such a view. First, speech has been round for millions of years before writing and has a much stronger pedigree. Even today there is far more speech than writing. You could argue (though I clearly wouldn’t want to) that writing is an inferior form of speech. Secondly, all linguists will tell you that research in the last hundred years is that speech isn’t slovenly writing - it has its own form of language with its own lexis and syntax and conventions. Speech follows its own rules - it is just that its rules are sometimes different to the rules of writing. In language terms, the two codes are just different.
There have always been those who think that dialects are slovenly and inferior to “standard speech”. Again, there are two things wrong with such a view. Linguistic experts can demonstrate that all dialects have a rich vocabulary and formal grammar - there is nothing inadequate or slovenly about them. Secondly, so-called “standard speech” is just another dialect. It just happens to be the dialect that the people in power (those roughly living in the triangle formed between Oxford, Cambridge, and London) spoke. Because of its associations with power and class it gained social prestige and spread. But it is just another dialect. Linguistically there is nothing inherently superior about it. In language terms, the two codes are just different.
There was an article in The Telegraph reporting the 20 most common (and by implication, most disliked) office clichés. I list them below for your information or amusement.
1. ‘At the end of the day’
2. ‘What goes around, comes around’
3. ‘It’s not rocket science’
4. ‘Thinking outside the box’
5. ‘Flogging a dead horse’
6. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’
7. ‘Going forward’
8. ‘By the close of play’
9. ‘Give you the heads up’
10. ‘Live and learn’
11. ‘C’est la vie’
12. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’
13. ‘Hit the ground running’
14. ‘Always look on the bright side of life’
15. ‘Suck it and see’
16. ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’
17. ‘Don’t worry, be happy’
18. ‘I know it’s a big ask’
19. ‘I’m out’
20. ‘There are no flies on me’
What struck me as I read them was that, given the context of office speech, I couldn’t find much to object to. The clichés seemed to be doing a pretty good job.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I find myself objecting to vacuous speech. I have a colleague, who, every day for the past 9 years has said, “Are you coping?”, who every Monday asks, “Did you have a good weekend?” When written down it may look meaningful but if I were to tell him I wasn’t coping and had a lousy weekend, he would pause for a second and more swiftly on. Linguists call this kind of language ‘phatic communication’. Although I object to this, even grumpy old me has to acknowledge that it serves a social purpose, despite it being devoid of linguistic meaning.
While phatic communication may unreasonably annoy me, I find myself wanting to defend the clichés. I wouldn’t want to use them in formal written prose because conventions would dictate they would be inappropriate (note, NOT inferior). However, in the context of office speech, they do serve a purpose. They express something succinctly and often amusingly. They are memorable, and powerful in their brevity. The history of spoken language shows that over time we have a tendency to adopt the shorter form and reject the longer or more complicated. (For example, although “do not” may appear quite happily in written language and very occasionally in speech for emphasis, “don’t” is the much more common speech form.) Just pause for a second and think how you would paraphrase each of the clichés if you were having to express the same sentiment in formal, written prose.
‘I think you need to try this for yourself and judge whether you think it is appropriate for you’ or ‘Suck it and see’.
‘There’s no point in continuing this course of action because the likelihood of us getting any improvement is minimal’ or ‘You’re flogging a dead horse’.
I hope you will consider my defence of clichés and try to understand the argument. At the end of the day, it isn’t rocket science!
I agree, and I think the clothing analogy is a good one; I’m quite fond of it myself: http://garics.blogspot.com/2009/09/of-language-clothes-and-dangerous.html
You may also like to visit Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/), in the unlikely event that you haven’t already. There have been a few similar posts there in defence of clichés
I always think it’s a very arbitrary distinction between all those quotations people throw around from time to time and the clichés. I am a great user of clichés and sayings. The trouble is I tend to muddle them up and people laugh or look puzzled - “don’t cross your bridges until they’ve hatched” - that kind of thing.
I do find it irritating when people have favourite clichés and pepper their sentences with them. I find that I stop listening to what they are saying and start counting (always the mathematician eh) how many times they say “at the end of the day” or whatever.
I am a bit of a traditionalist about words and spelling as you know and a big resister of Americanisation. I try to preserve words that I like (frock, pale, bosom) and stubbornly refuse to use new fangled words or text-speak or those WTF/LOL things. But I only do that to be contrary and because I love all the old English words!
Where possible I think it is a good thing to be able to be chameleon and fit in with whatever situation in which you find yourself. Some people find it curious that I do that, but having been brought up bilingually I don’t find it odd at all to adjust my way of speaking to the environment in which I find myself. I try to encourage my children to be able to do that - to have an extensive and rich vocabulary (to include big words, old words, new words and slang and swear words) that they can employ appropriately.
I liked the wardrobe analogy too. My head is a bit like my wardrobe actually - so cluttered and untidy that I can never find the bright shiny interesting words I want and end up using the same old tired and worn-out ones.
garic
Thanks for dropping by. It’s comforting to know that we share the same unease with linguistic prescriptivism. Another of my favourite analogies is that people who insist that language has absolute standards are like those people who think they can command the tide to stop.
Thanks too for the link. I don’t know the site but will take a look later.
Reluctant Blogger
I think that anything which is repeated again and again tends to draw attention to itself rather than to any initial intended meaning. Like you, I tend to count when things (even clichés) are repeated. At work we often take informal bets as to how often the particular gentleman in question is going to say some of his pet phrases during the course of a morning.
I am glad that you are a traditionalist just to be contrary or out of love for particular words, rather than out of any strong absolutist conviction. What I love most about my learning about language is the compelling sense that language is like water. It is massive, it flows wherever it will, and although you may build little dams to contain it for a while, dam-builders will never ever control it completely. It always leaks or evaporates.
I live for hybrid clichés especially from managers (in a Dilbert stylee) though loathe ‘blue sky thinking’ type business speak (I have a fear of being declared brain dead one day despite endlessly spouting a mixture of pop psycho-babble and ‘Bizz-nizz’-speak) but don’t these easy clichés fill an awkward vacuum in the void between just not knowing what to say to people you don’t really know? Lazy shorthand ice breakers which work initially but in the long term become like a form of cliché Tourette’s. For me they say ‘I have no idea what to say to you but here’s me at least going through the motions so please don’t engage in any kind of meaningful conversation or throw in any level of real intimacy because I really don’t want to go there’.
Admittedly these inane clichés are probably best deployed with the eternal strangers you meet in the newsagent (ooh dated social setting alert ), supermarket or post office.
Before condemning or praising it, you first need to define what a “cliché” is.
For my money, an expression is a cliché only if it is vacuous and often repeated out of habit, not to communicate meaning.
If the expression has a meaning and the meaning is appropriate to the context, then I wouldn’t define it as a cliché. For example, “Thank you” is probably one of the most often repeated and habitual expressions in English but no one would claim it was a cliché.
If I asked someone how to do something and he assured me that “It isn’t rocket science”, I might enquire, politely, why he doesn’t simply say “It’s easy”, but I would accept that the expression is meaningful and appropriate and therefore would not call it a cliché.
A pet hate of mine is the phrase “Going forward” because it is a pointless reformulation of the simpler “In future”. On the other hand, I accept that such formulations do have a use. For example, this one signals that the context is a business or managerial context and it makes the speaker (and listener) feel that something important is being said.
I agree that stock expressions (a better term, perhaps, than cliché, which is a bit of a cliché itself) are useful. They often act as shorthand for complex ideas, saving time and the energy of working out the meaning of a much more complicated expression. And to my mind, that is the key to the issue: meaning.
As long as we are conveying meaning, then we are using language legitimately, whatever variety of English we are speaking, but when we are not conveying meaning, just making a noise out of habit, then we are spitting clichés. And the meaning doesn’t have to be verbal. For example, the exchange “How are you?” “Fine, thanks, and you?” isn’t about health. It’s meaning isn’t verbal. It’s about two people meeting and “recognizing” one another and signalling this recognition. We might perhaps say the meaning is social, the spoken equivalent of a handshake.
Finally, I think that one of the important “meanings” of stock expressions is reassurance: by using certain common phrases, we are reassuring the other person that we are engaging them in a conventional form of exchange in which the rules are known and in which there are no traps or surprises.
“Stock expressions” is a good term. To me, it conveys the notion that these sorts of phrases are language units, similar to individual words, as some of the language tools we carry in our toolboxes.
Emsquared
I think you’re right - they are an easy, pull-off-the-shelf familiar product that meet needs when embarrassed or in a hurry. Silence can be very disturbing socially and they help fill a gap.
In a “newsagent’s” hey? Didn’t think they still existed
Is that where you used to buy your fags and chocolate? 
:-)
SilverTiger
Thanks for your precision, and for refining the argument.
the chaplain
I like toolboxes as a metaphor. Thanks.
Hmm…
In a country like Sweden, where English is a secondary though frequently ‘contaminating’ language, just a few phrases on the list have been carried over (I’ll have to introduce them at the office). In the publishing and business world you would be much more likely to catch:
Less is more
Content is King
Kill your darlings
Jonas
It is interesting how language grows through contamination, isn’t it.
I was struck by “Kill your darlings”. I haven’t come across that before. I found myself feeling that, for some, it might be very appropriate at this festive season
The phrase has been attributed to William Faulkner, but also to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, and others.
According to an excellent Swedish website dealing with ‘factoids’ (statements that are purportedly and generally taken to be true), this is the first real stating of it:
“You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
Arthur Quiller-Couch (1916)”
Jonas
Thanks Jonas.