Molly Roberts of the Washington Post made an incoherent attempt to paint our colleague Charles C. W. Cooke as a bully, saying that when Cooke pointed out erroneous thinking about gun policy on the part of David Hogg, “It did not go well.”

I don’t think Roberts is even aware that she is falling into the rhetorical trap of making an argumentum ad populum; she is simply delighted that social-media users took her side by venting their anger about what Cooke wrote. As anyone who has been on the Internet for more than ten minutes will have noticed, however, a guaranteed way to direct some pure oxygen at the Internet’s anger ambers is to point out things that are obvious, if such comments are perceived as constituting a hostile invasion of unwelcome fact into the soft, pillowy, pink-and-purple fantasy realm that is the progressive worldview. Roberts concedes as much when she says of Cooke’s argument, “He has a point,” which is as close as she can bring herself to admitting that Cooke is absolutely right and she has no substantive response, merely ad hominem snark about his supposed cruelty and heartlessness, backed by an appeal to similar ad hominem remarks from the braying mob. Roberts does all this, by the way, while deriding Cooke for supposedly making ad hominem remarks himself, but does not quote any of his ad hominem passages because there are none. “It’s one thing to say Hogg gets it wrong on guns. . . . It’s another to cry out that Hogg is a liar or an idiot.” (Good point, Ms. Roberts. Now please can you quote the bit where Cooke called Hogg “a liar or an idiot”? I’m having trouble finding it.)

As someone who strives to keep a wary eye out for cliche, though — Martin Amis aptly referred to good writing as a war on it — I was especially drawn to the laziness of Roberts’s sniping. New clichés are being created all the time, and “it did not go well” is in the newest class of them. (See also: “hold my beer,” “snowflake,” “safe space”).

Young women writers seem especially fond of using “It did not go well” as a comic understatement; it’s a laconic, wry suggestion that what follows will wow us (though it almost never does). Julie Muncy of io9: “Specifically, the role of the Poop Emoji in The Emoji Movie. Apparently, the Get Out director was offered the role, and it did not go well.” Lindsay Denninger of Bustle: “Arie opted to let her go. It did not go well, at least from Krystal’s side.” Megh Wright of SplitSider: “Iliza Shlesinger Came After Other Female Comics, and It Did Not Go Well.” Lindsey Kupfer of Bustle: “I decided I didn’t want to know anything about [the animated movie The Fox and the Hound] before I started, so please imagine me watching it for the first time with no knowledge of its plot. Spoiler alert: It did not go well.” (That reminds me: “spoiler alert” is a cliché also.)

Roberts’s usage of “It did not go well” strikes me as a tactic straight out of the Mean Girls school of rhetoric; the ploy is to disparage someone not for committing an error in any absolute sense but simply for going against accepted taste: “OMG did you hear Stacy wore mid-calf boots yesterday when everyone is wearing knee-highs? How does she not know?” Ridiculing an argument for being contrary to fashion, even an argument made by someone who admittedly “has a point,” is what you do when you have nothing else. A lot of young women advancing arguments on the Internet would do well to familiarize themselves with the difference between reasoning and “calling out.” Which is another cliché.