Clichés Are Pretty, Too

Hardly anything will make so many literary folk rally to a cause in such ecstatic agreement as the ceremony of denouncing trite expressions like rally to a cause and ecstatic agreement, both of which are clichés of the second water, if not of the first. In their Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, Bergen and Cornelia Evans, for instance, perform this ceremony over and over with all that enthusiastic disregard for monotony of those who, like young lovers, stand on ground which is both orthodox and fashionable. Dwight Macdonald’s review of the Evanses’ work furnishes a sample of the kind of support they know they can count on: “The extermination of clichés, those termites constantly eating at the foundations of our language, is an important job of a usage dictionary.”

(The New Yorker, May 17, 1958.)

MC

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Morton Cronin

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Hardly anything will make so many literary folk rally to a cause in such ecstatic agreement as the ceremony of denouncing trite expressions like rally to a cause and ecstatic agreement, both of which are clichés of the second water, if not of the first. In their Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, Bergen and Cornelia Evans, for instance, perform this ceremony over and over with all that enthusiastic disregard for monotony of those who, like young lovers, stand on ground which is both orthodox and fashionable. Dwight Macdonald’s review of the Evanses’ work furnishes a sample of the kind of support they know they can count on: “The extermination of clichés, those termites constantly eating at the foundations of our language, is an important job of a usage dictionary.”

(The New Yorker, May 17, 1958.)