by Ben Yagoda
Orwell conceived of this as one stage, but I think there’s a division within it that’s worth bearing in mind. Most tempting and insidious, and thus most important to guard against, are the clichés that seem to be in the very oxygen we breathe—dying metaphors like it’s not brain surgery and [anything] on steroids. Less of a problem is a category that could be called FFBC—clichés that are Famous For Being a Cliché. This would include such overworked expressions as at the end of the day and it is what it is and bromides and proverbs like it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity and a stitch in time saves nine. The world of sports is chock-full of these, for example, he came to play or he gave 110 percent. By this point, any conscientious writer knows these are off-limits; the vast majority of the time they come up in print is when they are mocked. (And rightfully so.)
Orwell observed that in the dying-metaphor stage, “incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.” Good point.
The New Yorker used to sometimes print especially egregious examples at the ends of articles, under the heading BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! Here is one published in 1989, from a letter to the Boston Globe:
In the face of mounting pressure to gut or eliminate the IRS, it continues to shoot itself in the foot by biting the hand that feeds them.
Whew. The obvious and truly awful mixing is of hand-biting and foot-shooting, but note a phrase at the beginning of the sentence: “mounting pressure to gut.” Pressure and gut are metaphors as well, but a reader isn’t likely to notice them. That’s because they have arrived at the next, and final, stage of metaphorical life. After a certain number of years or decades in critical condition, a metaphor kicks the bucket and comes to seem more literal than figurative. Orwell says such a “dead metaphor…has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.” When we hear of a program being gutted, we don’t think of this as a metaphor at all and probably don’t perceive it as a cliché; it’s just a way of saying that the most important aspects of something were rudely removed. The same goes for referring to someone’s weakness as his Achilles’ heel, or even using a word such as astonished, which originally was a metaphorical suggestion of a shock so great it turned one to stone. These are okay to use, then. Just don’t use too many of them, and definitely don’t use more than one in the same sentence.
Here are a couple of mixed metaphors from student writing, with possible fixes.
[The golden age of print journalism has rusted and there is a new age emerging from the wreckage—online journalism.]
Golden age has reached the dead metaphor stage and is (barely) acceptable; however, wreckage introduces a whole other idea. My approach would be to stick with the golden-age thing and actually extend it into what the poets call a conceit. Also, has rusted is kind of flat and the word journalism is repeated. So I would do something like:
The golden age of newspapers has turned into a pile of rust. But some smart young reporters have taken some sandpaper to it and emerged with something shiny and new—online journalism.
[The Christian Science Reading Room is a small cove of spiritual knowledge which historically has not been a beacon of popularity among college students.]
Small cove of spiritual knowledge isn’t bad, but bringing in the beacon ruins the effect. I would go for something simple, just adding a little understatement at the end:
The Christian Science Reading Room is a small cove of spiritual knowledge that historically hasn’t been hugely popular among college students.
A few lines up, I said it was “barely acceptable” to use dead metaphors. If I don’t seem enthusiastic, that’s because, first, even a cliché which doesn’t smell bad anymore smells worse than something fresh, and, second, in a particular case, some people might feel it’s not dead yet (as Monty Python would put it), that it’s still a cliché. The bottom line is the importance of at least developing an awareness of the sell-by date on words and expressions, weighing them in your mind, and acting judiciously. (In that sentence, I used three metaphors: bottom line, sell-by date, and weighing. I decided that they were dead, not dying. What do you think?)
I’d like to add another stage Orwell didn’t think of, perhaps because he didn’t live in the Internet era, when everything, including clichés’ lives, moves much faster than it ever did before. In today’s highly interactive world, there is a period—between the invention of a metaphor and the point at which it is definitively arrived at cliché land—in which it’s not only usable but can be lively and fun.
Consider the expression [to] throw [someone] under the bus, meaning to publicly betray an erstwhile ally. The earliest use I have been able to find is a 1994 quote from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article: “Bethel Park council is delaying action on a site plan for an ice arena because of legal action by a citizens group opposing the project. Council president Philip Ehrman said the group is ‘trying to throw the community under the bus.’” It first showed up in the New York Times in 2000, but didn’t really take off till a few years later, with seven uses in 2005 and thirteen in 2006—including, crucially, a discussion in William Safire’s “On Language” column in November. Up until that point, I would submit, throw under the bus was a still-new toy with which writers could give readers some shared pleasure. This is a risky business, however, because different people will have different notions on where a particular phrase lies at a particular point in time.
There’s one more strategy for making a cliché acceptable: the old switcheroo. In 1937, Time magazine observed, “To the people who voted for him last November, Franklin Roosevelt was Mr. Right.” Since roughly that time, Mr. Right—meaning a male who is perfect husband material—has been a cliché. One strategy for making it (marginally) acceptable was Time’s: that is, using it in a political as opposed to romantic context. There matters stood until 1985, when a television movie called Romance on the Orient Express contained this piece of dialogue: “I’m not looking for Mr. Right, I’m looking for Mr. Right Now.” Good show! The screenwriter tweaked the cliché and made it usable again. By now, of course, Mr. Right Now is as clichéd as it gets—and so is a recent (unisex) replacement, The One. Yet another variation would be needed to remove the stigma: Mr. Write for a dreamy literary guy, Mr. Left if the woman demanded a mate with progressive politics, Mr. Far Right for folks on the other end of the spectrum, Mr. Righter for someone chosen over a current beau, Mr. Rite Aid for a hypochondriac, Mr. Wry for an ironic sort, and so forth. You get the idea.
Even beyond the fact that the target is moving at warp speed extremely fast, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive list of clichés. First, there are way too many of them. Second, especially on the margins between dead and dying, what’s a cliché to you may not be one to me: it’s an inherently subjective judgment. Third, clichés are field-specific: if you are immersed in the world of sports, or pop music, or business, or higher education, you will be highly sensitized to particular buzzwords and catchphrases that would strike a layperson as unremarkable or unintelligible. And finally, they are register-specific. That is, a cliché in the world of blogs will not be one in the world of scholarly journals, and vice versa.
That being said, here’s a brief list of words and phrases that in my judgment are currently clichés and thus are to be avoided in writing:
That being said
Iconic
Viral
Curate
Deal breaker
Difference maker
The decider
Heavy lifting
High-maintenance
Perfect storm
Brick and mortar
Tsunami
It is what it is
Surreal
The [choose letter of the alphabet]-word
Not so much (as in I like him. Her? Not so much).
McMansions, McJobs, etc.
[Anything] on steroids
Bucket list
Kerfuffle
/> Badass
Spoiler alert
The Man (as in working for)
Back in the day
Not your father’s [anything]
Really? (to indicate skepticism)
Artisanal
Plated
House-made
Kick the can down the road
Meme
[anything] 2.0
Man-kini, man-cave, man-date, manorexia, or man-anything else
Get off my lawn!
Now get off my lawn!
5. EUPHEMISM, BUZZWORDS, AND JARGON
These closely related categories resemble clichés in being (as Tom and Ray of the radio show Car Talk like to say) unencumbered by the thought process. Euphemisms are prettifying terms. The classic example is the collection of ever-more-euphemistic words for the place where one goes to relieve oneself, which itself is a euphemism for urinate or defecate.* Thus we say restroom, which is a euphemism for men’s room or ladies’ room, which is a euphemism for bathroom, which is a euphemism for toilet, which is a euphemism for privy, which is a euphemism for…well, this notion is apparently so horrible and unpleasant that we don’t have an actual word for it. I guess that if there were a need to refer to it in writing, I would recommend bathroom as the most straightforward, even though baths are rarely taken there.
The military is famously a fount of euphemism, with such terms as armed intervention (war), neutralize (kill), pacify (kill), collateral damage (unintentionally kill), friendly fire (unintentionally kill fellow soldiers), and enhanced interrogation (torture). Euphemisms for pregnancy are legion as well. The most recent term I’m aware of originated in Great Britain in the 1990s and has been taken up by American celebrity journalists with a vengeance; it is to refer to a pregnant woman as having a baby bump.
Need I say that, unless you’re being ironic or quoting someone, enhanced interrogation, baby bump, and their ilk should not pass through your fingers?
Jargon—instances of which are sometimes known as buzzwords—differs from euphemism in a couple of ways. It usually originated with members of a particular occupation or group, and it usually fancifies or obfuscates something that doesn’t have an especially negative connotation. Sometimes, it names a thing or phenomenon for which there was no previous word. Sometimes, it means pretty much nothing at all. Jargon is a more egregious problem than euphemism, in my experience; it is strangely enticing and can spread like a virus.
Politics is home to a particular kind of jargon: words and phrases intended to spin a particular issue in a particular direction. People on different sides of the political spectrum express the same concepts in completely different vocabularies! Thus progressives are pro-choice and in favor of investment and increasing revenue. Patriotic Americans, for their part, rail against abortion on demand, tax-and-spend policies, the death tax, and the Democrat Party. (The last is a clever one, in subtly dissociating the party with small-d democratic.) If you’re on one side or the other and trying to stoke the fire on any of these issues, go nuts with the terms I’ve used and the many others like them. However, if your aim is to write in an intelligent, nonpartisan way, avoid them at all costs. Instead, seek words that accurately and temperately convey meaning, such as legalized abortion, government spending, taxes (in general), and the estate tax (in particular).
Prose that comes from business—both advertising and public relations, on the one hand, and internal communication, on the other—contains more jargon than nonjargon. The particular terms in vogue change from time to time. Currently, they include reach out to (contact or get in touch with), going forward (in the future), monetize (make money from), best practices (doing something in a good or efficient way), sustainable (doing something so as not to degrade the environment, which itself is a buzzword that made its way into general diction), grow (transitive verb meaning “develop” or “increase the size of”), give back (make a charitable contribution or conduct a charitable enterprise), bandwidth (personal or organizational capacity), and rightsize (save money by firing people—which takes us back to euphemism).
Between writing that paragraph and this one, I had lunch and read the New York Times, which reported that a radio corporation called Clear Channel Communications had fired several dozen disk jockeys employed by the radio stations it owns around the country. The Times quoted “a company spokeswoman” as saying: “We’ve completely rethought our regional market strategy and reinvented our operations in those markets in a way that will let us compete on a new level—and succeed using all of Clear Channel’s resources, scale and talent.”
That is euphemistic jargon on a very high level indeed. If you work and write for a business, or if you aspire to, you might want to study it, for a mastery of this discourse seems to be essential if you want to rise to the top. I certainly hope the student who wrote the following sentence for one of my journalism classes was interested in a career in public relations or corporate communications, rather than as an actual writer, trying to tell something true to actual readers:
[The employer relation’s team at Career Services has made a strong effort in trying to facilitate an assertive outreach program toward alumni in order to help build a better partnership with alumni and current students.]
Actually, that’s probably a bit much even in a business setting. In any case, what he meant to say was:
The employer relations department at Career Services has asked alumni to get in touch with students.
Generally speaking, this kind of nonsense isn’t that hard to avoid. But somewhat more insidious is a collection of terms that originated, I believe, in psychology and other helping professions (itself a prime bit of jargon). The two worst offenders are the verb share (often used as a synonym for say, as in He shared that he was coming home) and the noun issues used to mean problems or disagreements or some other negative feelings, as in She has issues with her mother. My closing piece of advice in this section—and words to live by in general—is to write, when the facts support it:
She despises her mother.
C. Sentences
1. WORD REP.
The above phrase (the second part of which is an abbreviation for repetition) is the comment I write most frequently on student papers. That’s because, I think, word repetition is a telltale—maybe the telltale—sign of awkward, nonmindful writing. The writer has presumably gotten the pertinent information onto the screen or page, but has not taken the time to read the sentence to herself, silently or out loud. If she did, that word rep. would sound like a fingernail on the blackboard. Consequently, “listening” to your sentences with the sensitivity and skill to pick up word repetition is a strong first step toward mindful writing.
There are some nuances to my unified theory of word repetition, which boil down to: the more common the word, the more leeway you have in repeating it, and vice versa. In the previous sentence, I repeated to, word, more, and the (twice!). That is not ideal, but it’s okay; readers are not likely to notice. On the other hand, I know I have to wait at least a few more pages before reusing nuances, leeway, or the expressions vice versa and boils down to. Words like repetition and common would be somewhere in between. I would not be able to use the notion of unified theory again in the entire article or book.
The word-repetition problem can be hard to solve. Usually, a writer uses a word twice because no alternative is self-evident or, sometimes, conceivable after what seems like a lengthy period of cogitation. A particular pitfall is the infelicity that H. M. Fowler dubbed elegant variation. He was referring to a synonym, near synonym, or invented synonym used for the express and blatant purpose of avoiding word repetition.
For example (EV in brackets):
Hartnell read the newspaper. When he was finished [with the periodical], he got up and went outside.
Spence hit a home run in the second inning, his fifth [circuit clout] of the campaign.
In these cases, as is often true, the simplest solution is simply to take the EV out. Voilà! Incidental
ly, perceptive readers may have noticed that the second sentence contains another EV: the campaign. Mediocre sportswriters are elegant variers to the bone, and they will reflexively seek to avoid a common word, in this case season. However, season is better than campaign.
Back to word repetition, check out these examples from student work, with the repeated word underlined. First make sure you read them attentively enough to notice that the repetition is unfortunate. Below each sentence I’ll suggest a fix.
[Spending the day rushing from Memorial Hall to Main Street to Trabant is a typical day at the University of Delaware.]
Pretty easy.
A typical day at the University of Delaware involves rushing from Memorial Hall to Main Street to Trabant.
Improving this one doesn’t involve much heavy lifting, either.
[When I was an undergraduate student earning a minor in painting I developed a particular interest in de Kooning’s paintings.]
When I was an undergraduate earning a minor in painting, I developed a particular interest in de Kooning’s work.
Here’s one that’s easier still:
[Johnson is the youngest representative in the legislature. When he was twenty-three, Johnson defeated the Republican incumbent.]