In Pursuit of a Cliché

Once upon a time (I start with this phrase for a reason!), every cliché in our language was said, or more likely written, for the very first time, and when it was written is was entirely original, and it so perfectly hit on the essence of whatever sentiment or phenomenon or human proclivity it was describing, someone read it and repeated it to someone else, and everyone who heard it found that it described just wonderfully some thing they had always thought but never articulated, until it spread and spread more and became so commonplace a way to describe that thing it morphed into a cliché.

Which means, in the end, that it was a fabulous piece of writing, so fabulous that it was the best way that particular sentiment had ever been written.

The goal of a writer, then, should be to come up with just one turn of phrase that is so unprecedented and so unnervingly original and so suddenly necessary to communication that it might also someday join the ranks of the cliché.

Do you know how many of today’s cliches came from Shakespeare?! It’s in the thousands … (a sorry sight, a sea change, all’s well that ends well, all that glitters is not gold, dead as a doornail, one fell swoop, eaten out of house and home, a charmed life, love is blind, and onandonandonandon).

The goal of the writer should be to embed a cliché in the lexicon. Which means you can’t fall back on the cliches that came before you. It means you have to spend hours, if that what it takes, thinking of the best four words that ever described the feeling you had the time when your best friend made fun of you in front of the whole lunchroom, or what have you.

-originally published on A Veblenesque Gorge

I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat.
-Joan Didion

In economics, Veblen goods are a group of commodities for which people's preference for buying them increases as their price increases, as greater price confers greater status, instead of decreasing according to the law of demand. A Veblen good is often also a positional good. The Veblen effect is named after economist Thorstein Veblen, who first pointed out the concepts of conspicuous consumption and status-seeking.
-Wikipedia