Cliché Calling For A Change

P Kharel

Old is gold but we are told all that glitters is not necessarily gold. Clichés don’t tire provided they are contextually appropriate and especially when not invoked for long spells. Hence, they are shying away from it is not called for. Welcome to the use of clichés in the hurly burly world of different genres and aspects of literature, including scribing for journalism.

Cliché carries a treasure trove of collective meaning to be bared and shared for enlarging its use and circulation. Pure literature aficionados might not agree but newspapers and other media receive and accept it as a regular spice to communications. They do with movie titles, ad billboards, promos, radio broadcast programmes, headlines and speeches and the like. News lead and the rest of the body are every now and then sprinkled with what some “purists” would dismiss as “hackneyed” words.  

Learn your lessons well. After all, an empty vessel sounds too much. Little knowledge is dangerous but wholesome knowledge is soul of life. Bake sugar-coated stories that will prove your task a cake walk. Make hay when the sun shines, for time and tide wait for no one.

Discard not

There is nothing like success. Experience tells us success frequently breeds success, with discretion being the better part of valour. One should look before leaping. Care is needed to ensure that one does lower his/her guard. Even if an iron gate, the process of verification is essential.

A cliché is a cliché but it is true: Education is to the brain what eyesight is to the blind. The declining number of those versed in clichés should spare thoughts to the many who otherwise might be deprived of the existence, meaning and use of the rich world of words treated as a black hole, even if they at one time worked wonders for all. They should not become an islet of the knowing in the ocean of the not-knowing when it comes to clichés. 

Too much of anything might not do good but a healthy dose of the same would serve as food for thought. The familiarity in cliché recreates communication situations with powerful clarity. If appropriately invoked, it conveys the thoughts in the messages easily without the burden of ambiguity. 

Journalism is a free-for-all scribing in that the use of clichés is not boycotted in the order of the profession. Book and cinema titles, for instance, borrow liberally from events, places and personalities. This way they draw quick attention and flash easy-to-understand message. At the twinkling of an eye, the recipient can picture and digest a portrayal. Visual depictions can also earn a cliché tag. 

Half a century ago, Lucien Pye defined the act of communication as representing “the web of human society”. For that matter, 30 years before him, Walter Lippmann, in his Public Opinion (1922) described “pictures in our head” as a powerful manifestation of communication, which is now widely recognised as a sociopolitical institution.

Undoubtedly, many a mind might find themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. Suggesting the positive side of clichés could risk being labelled growing too big for one’s boots. Among them, the future pillars of the literary world mull over the suggestion from a passionate novice. 

This is a loud thinking committed to pen and paper in a public platform that The Rising Nepal is—the country’s second oldest broadsheet newspaper. The thought is by no means a tall tale spun for a large and wise audience of the reading variety.

The genre of pure literature has its own distinguishing features, creating diction and phrases, for which posterity doffs its hat in appreciative acknowledgement.  If used too often by others, the invocation can be reduced to offering clichés. 

The past will have to reconcile with the present. That’s what looking forward accounts to. Interestingly, even if related to an issue not connected with the cliché topic, The New York Times refused to review eight of Gore Vidal’s history-based novels. Its editors even gave hints that the best-selling writer’s works would not even read them. Big bosses vent their biases in voluminous arrogance by reacting in haste, only to suffer for the folly in leisure. 

Clarity in priority

One can agree to disagree, in deference to hear the other side’s story to pave way for multiway traffic and wide public debate. The approach triggers the filtering of ideas that eventually are developed by more others as something to share. 

There is a pack that sternly rejects the use of cliché. Let its tribe bloom in its own groove. Others should not shy away from summoning the clichés from deep freeze to be exchanged, particularly by the young and the uninitiated. If familiarity in the use of diction generates clarity, predictability conveys the pursuit of emphasis. 

After all, repetition denotes a desire to attract quick attention. Every dog has its day; so does a cliché. It is handy and does not beat about the bush. Depending on the characters and contexts involved in the setting of a novel, it adds to the scene, setting, description and dialogue [direct quotes] in the literature in hurry that goes by the name of journalism. 

In communications, the linear mode commands one-way traffic whereas the nonlinear process essentially calls for two-way/multiway exchanges. Likewise, in the world of a more lasting literature, too, the ever expanding vault of cliché should not be cast aside as overused negating originality.

Touching upon the esoteric world of literature is not an easy undertaking for especially someone batting since several decades for the news media, while admitting that overdose of anything puts off people. However, the context and conditions of a given situation should deserve tapping the collection of clichés.

To invoke that age old saying, honesty is the best policy. Expressing one’s thoughts candidly might not be everyone’s cup of tea or even ensure a sea change in tastes and habits. Pedantic or otherwise, what might ring in as odd is only human; to give it a fair hearing is divine.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)