You all know what’s coming next when someone says, “If you’re going to talk the talk…” You know, you just know, and you wince, and sure enough, he has to finish it: “…you have to walk the walk.” Sometimes the “talk” and “walk” parts are reversed. Arrrrgh! The most recent example I’ve seen was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stretched it out as if the last phrase were a delightful and unexpected punch-line.
Today’s subject is not clichés, it’s new clichés. There is nothing worse.
We all use clichés. It’s almost impossible not to. We get mad as a wet hen and we haven’t got a clue, and we’re happy as a clam, and our friends are true blue, or free as a bird, but we wouldn’t trust them as far as we could throw them, and on and on.
It’s OK. After awhile the cliché just becomes another word or phrase in our vocabulary. We try to avoid them, but they slip through, and most people don’t notice. It’s OK.
But the NEW clichés are hard not to notice. If you hear a new phrase once or twice you might even be impressed with its ingenuity, but after the third time it begins to grate against your eardrums. Sometimes these constructions become mini-memes that go viral.
One of the most annoying, and most ubiquitous, is “going forward” or its variant “moving forward.” You can’t watch C-SPAN for more than a quarter-hour without hearing one of them. There are many ways to say “in the future,” but in some circles they have all been replaced with these inanities.
Another mini-meme that annoys me should be relegated only to the conversations of well-drillers and dentists: the use of “drill down” to mean to look at more closely. This one was viral for a while, but I am hopeful that it speeding towards the trash-heap.
I must admit I am a reformed sinner in this regard. There was a time in my life when words like “cool,” “groovy,” “wow,” and “like” made up about a quarter of my utterances. Luckily, I moved forward.
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