| 词组 | cliché |
| 释义 | cliché Cliché is in origin a French word for a stereotyped printing surface. The C volume of the OED (1893) recognized it only as a foreign word with this meaning. Its use to mean "a trite phrase or expression" is only attested in the OED Supplement from 1892. It seems to have caught on very quickly; by the 1920s it was already being disparaged as "worn": • The word 'cliche' itself, we have seen, is a cliche, a worn counter of a word —Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923 Most usage books and handbooks devote themselves to talking about what a cliché is. We will try to do that and also pay some attention to the word itself. 1.The word. Reader's Digest 1983 notes that cliché is regularly used as a term of disparagement, which should surprise no one. From the following examples you can see that it has been extended semantically from words to ideas to visual images to things of various kinds: • The dialog is largely cliches decked out in current jargon —Howard Kissel, Women's Wear Daily, 27 Dec. 1976 • ... his mischief with the clichés in our language — John Irving, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 10 June 1979 • ... "investing in human capital" is the cliché for this —Leonard Silk, Saturday Rev., 22 Jan. 1972 • ... a dubious cliché about the upper-class Englishman's habit of understatement —Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story, 1971 • ... an absolutely hilarious parody of every possible cliché ever invented about the American male — Arthur Knight, Saturday Rev., 13 May 1972 • A recurring media cliché is the "human interest" story about the grandmother graduating from college —Fred M. Hechinger, Saturday Rev., 20 Sept. 1975 • Some of the illustrations for this volume are so familiar they have become clichés —Michael Kämmen, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 4 July 1976 • ... the visual clichés with which the televising of music is cursed —Irving Kolodin, Saturday Rev., 1 Nov. 1975 • ... tired and disconnected routines that drew on little more than the clichés of modern dance —Alan Rich, New York, 24 Apr. 1972 • ... malls have, in the past 10 years, become almost a cliché of so-called urban renewal —William Marlin, Saturday Rev., 7 Feb. 1976 • The Georgetown cocktail party, by now, is as much of a political cliché as the rubber-chicken dinner — Linda Charlton, N. Y. Times, 19 Apr. 1976 • ... an anthology of threadbare clichés of haute and bistro cuisine —Jay Jacobs, Gourmet, December 1980 Copperud 1970, 1980 notes that cliché is used redundantly with old and usual. Such qualifiers seem to go naturally with cliché much as old seems to go with adage and maxim. Our evidence suggests that such combinations are not preponderant, but also not uncommon. See old cliché, old maxim; old adage. You may also have noted that the unaccented cliche is sometimes used but the accented cliché is much more common. 2. The thing. Although many commentators and handbooks discuss clichés, there is not a great deal to be learned from reading their discussions. You will be advised in most instances simply to avoid clichés. You will not have the reasons for your avoiding them very well explained; you will be told only that they weaken your writing or are an insult to the intelligence of your readers. Perhaps there is a hidden suggestion that you will sound like a journalist: • After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of clichés —Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982 You will also not learn much about what is and what is not a cliché. Oh, everybody agrees on a definition— the one given at the beginning of this article is typical— but there is little agreement about what fits the description. For instance, can a single word be a cliché? Or must a cliché be a phrase or longer expression? Earlier we saw that Havelock Ellis called the word cliché a cliché way back in 1923. Christopher Ricks in Michaels & Ricks 1980 calls single words clichés, and apparently so have many others between those two dates: a letter to the editor of the Saturday Review in 1965 complained specifically about cliché being applied to single words in the pages of that magazine. The editors of Reader's Digest 1983 raise several questions (similar ones can also be found in Copperud 1970, 1980 and Harper's 1975, 1985) about what distinguishes a cliché from any number of other frequently used stock phrases and expressions such as how do you do or thank you. The questions have a serious point, but no one seems to know the answer. We will offer only two suggestions. The first is that in all the use of trite, overused, stale, outworn, threadbare and such descriptors there is probably a connecting thread of meaninglessness. You might, then, want to base your notion of the cliché not on the expression itself but on its use: if it seems to be used without much reference to a definite meaning, it is then perhaps a cliché. But even this line of attack fails to separate cliché from the common forms of polite social intercourse. A second and more workable approach would be simply to call a cliché whatever word or expression you have heard or seen often enough to find annoying. Many writers, in fact, do seem to use some such rough-and-ready definition. Here, for instance, is a book reviewer: • He doles out his ghoulish clichés to the exorcists with equal largesse: the priest's panic "was marinated in a tide of sullenness"; "Slivers of agony jabbed and pierced through his buttocks and groins." —Francine Du Plessix Gray, TV. Y. Times Book Rev., 14 Mar. 1976 Now those expressions may be clichés to the reviewer of exorcism novels, but there are plenty of nonreaders of the genre who have never seen them before. Indeed, you are likely to find, when you read anyone's list of clichés, at least a few that you have never seen or heard before. Christopher Ricks in Michaels & Ricks 1980 observes that writers against clichés invariably use clichés to make their point. This observation suggests that there is an inconsistency in the dogged pursuit and cornering of clichés that is akin to the suggestion that opponents of gun control be shot. If clichés can only be shot down with other clichés, there would seem to be little point in trying too hard. Moreover, many of our commentators conclude that the utter avoidance of clichés is impossible for one reason or another. Therefore, they advise, if you come to a situation where a cliché is the best way to express an idea, go ahead and use it. "The most overworked cliché is better than an extravagant phrase that does not come off," says Howard 1984. Several other commentators concur. The advice seems sound to us. For those who are interested in collecting expressions others have thought to be clichés, Copperud mentions headings under which they may be found in Follett and Fowler. The longest list we have seen is in Partridge 1942, where he includes most of his Dictionary of Clichés ( 1940); the list runs for more than 20 pages. 3. If you suspect that one-way ticket to oblivion in "This is one of the many hoary newspaper clichés that have long since earned one-way tickets to oblivion" (Harper 1985) is a bit of a cliché, you may then realize that writers on usage and compilers of handbooks are not immune to the attraction of clichés in their own writing. Such frequently invoked terms as the careful writer, strictly speaking, a more precise term, formal speech and writing, casual speech, anything goes, permissive linguist, and the like, and such descriptive terms as colloquial, overworked, wordy, awkward, illiterate, overused, are certainly reflexive enough and devoid enough of content in much of their use to qualify as clichés. A number of these that present particular problems will receive separate treatment in this book. |
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