Cliches Redux

I had this idea of tackling the concept of cliches in writing, so when I sat down this evening, I had a look through the archive to see if I'd said anything about the subject before. I recalled using George Orwell's rules for writing as the basis of a post, long ago, so I thought I might also unearth that.

Well, I'm simultaneously too clever by half, and not quite clever enough, because I already wrote something "about" cliches, way back in 2012 (between reviews of the Hunger Games books and the Dark Knight Rises). Here it is, in all its glory.

But because it's 8.30 on a Sunday and I don't know what else to write, I decided to revisit it, because I  think I missed out a key concept about cliches in writing back then, and I'd like to try to address that lack.

In the previous post, I said:

That got me thinking about why exactly cliches are bad, and the answer I've come to is that they let you turn off your brain while writing.

That's strictly true, because you're relying on someone else's words to convey your meaning. In its most extreme form, an example would be the aliens from that Star Trek TNG episode Darmok, where they talk in metaphors that only have meaning to them ("Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", "Shaka when the walls fell", and so forth).

But Darmok illustrates another disadvantage of relying on cliche to explain something, namely that it can obscure the meaning for a reader who's not familiar with the expression. You can say that something's so rare that it only happens once in a blue moon, but the person who hears that might not understand that a "blue moon" is when two full moons occur in a single calendar month.

(Actually, the site I used to confirm that points out that there's an older meaning, but let's go with mine for the time being).

The worst cliches, instead of properly conveying information, obscure it. One that always drove me nuts would appear frequently in the stories of Harry Turtledove. He'd sometimes describe a character who was Irish as "having a map of Ireland on his face". Now, the character didn't literally have a map of Ireland tattooed or stapled to his visage, but what does the expression actually mean?

Is it that he looks really Irish? Sure, but that doesn't help if you don't know which facial configuration is particularly Irish. Or does he look like a mishmash of every different Irish feature? Possibly, but that's not very helpful either, for the same reason as above and because you don't know if he's got the eyes of an Ulsterman, the nose of a Dubliner and the lower lip of a man of the Aran Islands.

Not that I know what any of those looks like, but you get how maddening this kind of thing can be.

Another one that I hear a lot is "partaking too much of the fruit of the grape". This is meant to say that someone's drunk, but it's a bit flowery and misdirected (more a euphemism than a true cliche) and not necessarily conveying what you want it to. But you run into phrasing like this when you want to say something more clever than "he had too much alcohol".

So to sum up, not only are cliches overused, but they don't necessarily convey the meaning you want them to, which is an even more important reason to avoid them. I'm not saying that language should be completely free of metaphor or that it should completely free of ambiguity, but as writers we should be aware of the meaning we are trying to convey, and make sure the words or expressions we use convey exactly as much or as little as we want. A cliche is like an unreliable gun, in that you don't know what target it'll hit.

And if that's not a way to end a blog post, I don't know what is! I may have overdone that metaphor a little, but if so, it kind of proves my point.