The case for cliché

If I had neglected to brush my hair, my grandmother would say that I looked like a birch-broom in a fit. Untidy clothing made me look as though I had been pulled through a hedge backwards. If I appeared unhappy she would say that I had a face like a wet week. These similes, exaggerated and invariable, were so familiar that their metaphoric images scarcely registered. You could call them clichés. If so, they were clichés that went with my grandmother’s character, like her powder-compact, rain-mate and the mothball smell of her fur coat.

John Rentoul, the political journalist with the Independent on Sunday, has declared war on clichés in a little book called The Banned List (Elliott & Thompson, £8.99). The words he lists are only banned by him, so they thrive untroubled in the wider world like Japanese knotweed. (Am I allowed to liken things that spread to Japanese knotweed? Let me see.