As Martin Amis once wrote in his review of Michael Crichton’s book, The Lost World, in the jungle of the world of letters, “Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free.”
Spending our days combing through stacks of dailies and weeklies here at CJR Daily, we, too, come across our share of clichés tucked away on the pages of our most respected publications, and each time one pops up, we ask ourselves, “Why?”
Sure, with the pressure of filing several stories a week, it’s tempting to recycle some ideas or rely on the crutch of cliché — if for no other reason than to pad the word count a bit. Still, it’s hard to take when a writer for a major publication lazily tosses a weak cliché into one of their pieces.
Yesterday, we ran across a double book review in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times (granted, not necessarily the place to go looking for literary criticism), that borrowed a quote so tired, so hackneyed, it made even our cynical eyes wince:
Forty years ago Andy Warhol predicted that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” A decade later he revised that to “in 15 minutes everyone will be famous.” Now the concept gets another update: With eight words, Periel Aschenbrand will be famous.
The Warhol quote. When will we be finished with the Warhol quote? It has to be one of the most abused American utterances of the last 50 years. It’s everywhere — and has been everywhere — for as long as we can remember, and given that it can hardly teach us anything we don’t already know, we respectfully call for its retirement.
Unhappy as that reading experience was, it reminded us of what, for our money, may be the most overused cliché of our new millennium: “a perfect storm.” No one is safe. One example of a writer too good to trot out such a lame device still falling victim occurred about two weeks ago in the Washington Post, when, dealing with the charges being leveled against Tom DeLay, the Post‘s Dan Balz wrote that “The indictment — which Republicans say is politically motivated — adds to the gathering headwind that now threatens the Republicans as they look toward the 2006 elections. Whether this becomes the perfect storm that eventually swamps the GOP is far from clear a year out.” (Emphasis ours.)
Balz has been with the Post for about 27 years — that’s a lot of bylines — and we’re not attacking his reporting, but “perfect storm”? Shouldn’t editors have put a moratorium on using that now-tired phrase a couple of years ago? Isn’t there a better and more original metaphor to describe a confluence of events? One could ask any number of writers and journalists the same thing, as the metaphor still seems to be quite popular . The extent of its continued use is disheartening, but for some reason, those in the news business appear to love the phrase.
While we’re picking on just two clichés here, there are others out there stalking our print, online and television outlets, waiting to annoy people like us (who are, admittedly, looking be to annoyed). Is it too much to ask for a little linguistic innovation? If you write down to your readers, they’ll come to expect nothing more, but if you give them the benefit of the doubt, they’ll come to expect nothing less. And isn’t that the point?
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.