The battle has been raging for ages, and it will as long as mankind exists. The literati squirm under its shadow; we detest it, we loathe it, and as an immutable slice of our existence we have all fallen prey to it: the cliché. I am no exception. Being found to be nothing more than a tired bromide is something I fear vehemently. It's so easy to judge this curious concept, so easy that our judgement of clichés has become, in fact, cliché. What is this repetition?

Hmmm...what should I say next? I could go writing-101-school-girl, with a nice "Webster's dictionary denotes this as..." sentence, but heavens, that's so cliché.

Websters:
1 : a trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it
2 : a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation
3 : something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace

Thesaurus.com:
banality, boiler plate, buzzword, chestnut, commonplace, corn, counterword, familiar tune, high camp, motto, old saw, old song, old story, platitude, potboiler, prosaism, proverb, rubber stamp, saw, saying, shibboleth, slogan, stale saying, stereotype, trite remark, triteness, triviality, truism

Wikipedia:
"A cliché (from French cliché, stereotype) is a phrase or expression, or the idea expressed by it, that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially where the same expression was at one time distinctively forceful or novel. As a result, many feel that they should be avoided like the plague. Because the novelty or frequency of an expression's use vary between different times and places, whether a given expression is a cliché depends largely on who uses it and who makes the judgment. Originally cliché was a printing term for a semi-permanently assembled piece of type which could easily be inserted into the document being printed."

I was surprised to find an actual list, or rather a lexicon of clichés, ranging all the way from expressions to sports to literature to video games. The more I read and research the notion the more intriuged I am. Why is it that we, the incredible modern-day masters, the top of the food chain, the dominatrixes of the earth must result to such tired epitephs over and over again to denote our existence?

As I said before, there is no innocence. There isn't an individual alive who hasn't found redundancies to be easier and sometimes clearer than original expression. If one has lived life without becoming a mere duplicate of the situations and material we find to be common, then they haven't lived at all. This seems so easy to type, so easy to read, yet it is hardly an accepted thought in our society. Only the defeated admit to the cliché functioning as an active part of their lives. Wikipedia even comments that "many feel that [clichés] should be avoided like the plague". We can't avoid this, nobody can. In the end we must look back and realize that there were points of our life during which we had succumbed to the plague.

We, as a people, do not accept this. We vigorously support the ideology of pre manufactured thought yet we deny it. We embrace the prefab culture; we smoke cigars and own clunky furniture if we are masculine, successful men, we drive F150s and own rifles if we are Texans, we drink lattes while spitting upon our country if we are intellectuals, we wear Manolos and un matching purses if we are fashionistas, and we continuously digress into a hair gel substance abuse problem if we are gay males. Why is it, then, that the fashionistas insist that their metallic bag and floral Blahniks are original and coordinate perfectly? Why do the intellectuals swim in their supposed originality as if it were a giant ocean that every other intellectual happens to swim in as well? Why are we so ashamed of the obvious?

The cause of the cliché's dominance is the vivid truth that stands behind it. All art students marvel at the mysterious desire to wear black berets once they declare their major. On a more serious note however, how shocking it is to fall in love for the first time and to realize, to your absolute horror, that it really does take your breath away. How repulsive to embrace the one you love, gaze into the eyes that face you, and discover they do, in fact, feel deep enough to swim in. It's understandable; the feelings shared between two individuals has been time and time again regarded as the strongest we'll ever encounter. To experience that for the first time, and to stand within inches of what you've found, is positive rapture. It seems as if those eyes, the windows to the soul, are endless. Inarticulation is debilitating but easy.

How I loathe being swept into different steriotypes, how vexing and hurtful the labels that are thoughtlessly forced upon us truly are. Everyone has experienced this, in one way or another. This judgment is not only a racial thing, a sexual thing, a money thing, but seeps into every aspect of our lives, uninvited. Everyone has been labeled as a molly, fag, gringo, intellectual, butch, nigger, bean-eater, slut, metrosexual, barbie, idiot, pshycotic female, chink, cunt, queen, hick, wuss, yuppy, priss, American, etc. Everyone has, in turn, succumbed to hypocrisy and has carelessly recycled such primitive thought, slinging it upon the next individual who so snugly fits into the category in which they belong.

The plague is deep but it skims the surface of our lives as well; 'vomit' is really the only thing that accessorizes well with the label-concocted divas of pop culture, their mob of afficionados, and their prefab lyrics that clumsily praise love and companionship while incidentally but openly debasing it. Kelly Clarkson, winner of American Idol (So cliché), progressed past her sweet girl, romantic ballad contestant days to slide into an edgier era (soooo cliché), wear too much eye liner (sooooooo cliché), and produce a rock single about 'breathing for the first time' after breaking up with a guy with a fohawk and baggy jeans (sooooooooo cliché!). You listen to the song everytime you get in your car, but forsake the dear melody when acquaintances become a factor and opt to talk about Condoleezza Rice instead (My 'o' key has suffered enough for one day, thank you very much). I'm not trying to lecture you; I happen to have 'Since U been gone' on my MP3 player (kindly note the distinctive U). I happen to listen to it all the freaking time. I happen to never let anybody ever know about it.

Here I state it quite unashamedly, though. Is this my first step to crawling out of the depressing epidemic of the cliché? Is such action even possible? Some argue that we are creatures of evolution. If we are, is it possible that we will evolve past the days of dying metaphors and meaningless words, though they have saturated literature since it's birth? Perhaps we will. Perhaps it is merely a fool's errand, however, and accepting redundance is the only way to proactively function around it. Perhaps I, as an aspiring illuminati, have pondered this with big words and pretentious diction, mentioned tired examples and common references, and after all has been said, I have posted this on my blog as means of sealing what I truly am: cliché.



(Please reference Orwell's brilliant 'Politics and the English Language' for related thought, as well as this definition and bertisevil.tv