The most tired cliché in English, suggests Orin Hargraves, the American philologist, is at the end of the day. I’ve just read a review in the Times Literary Supplement of his book on clichés, It’s Been Said Before, published not this year, or in 2016, or 2015, but in 2014. This seems an admirable attitude to noticing books. Why not leave a book a generation? Let time separate wheat from chaff, and save the effort of threshing and winnowing.
Mr Hargraves may well frighten readers into guiltily examining their worn, off-the-peg language, but he sees the glory of cliché. It provides ‘a stock of dependable formulas for conveying the ordinary’, which sounds as poetic as Homer. He (Mr Hargarves, not Homer) distinguishes between a cliché and an idiom, the meaning of which is ‘noncompositional’, that is, not apparent from the words that make it up.
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