`Like Flies to Dead Meat'

When Steven Millhauser published Enchanted Night in 1999, among its reviewers was a novelist who lambasted Steven’s alleged reliance on clichés. Steven and I were friends and neighbors in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and he fumed about the accusation – rightly, because he’s a slow-laboring writer who weighs each syllable. Among other things, he’s also a subtle parodist. If Steven uses a cliché, you can be certain he’s aware of it and having a good laugh. The reviewer missed the joke, and to compound his error and make himself look even more ridiculous, he wielded, with a straight face, the predictable arsenal of reviewing chestnuts. His wrong-headed review read, in effect, like a cliché-ridden parody of a parody of clichés, but nobody laughed. I’m being purposely vague, to protect the dim and lazy.

The distinction between mindless marshalling of clichés and reanimation of tired language by an enterprising writer is not always apparent. Neither is the distinction between kneejerk deployment of catchphrases and a relish for colorful colloquialisms. In his entry for heinous -- “this word is full of hate (haine in French)” -- in The Secret Lives of Words, Paul West skewers clichés while endorsing the genius of American slang:

“As I get older, I find myself understanding less and less of what I hear or overhear, although still raging against those who spout `during the course of that time’ to mean then, but utterly bamboozled by an announcement that goes `Her time horizon for investing was short-term,’ perhaps a posy for `she was impatient.’ This is what happens when the semi-literate cleave to jargon like flies to dead meat. Oh, as I am always saying, for the shock of American slang, from chin music to bupkiss, trim to gobsmacked, skuzzy to zone-out. That’s English.”

Television, movies, the Internet, pop psychology, advertising and political discourse conspire to turn even the fully literate -- intelligent people with expansive vocabularies – into willing automatons of drivel. Pride in articulation is rare and, in some quarters, judged shameful. This is regrettable, for a cliché is the verbal equivalent of a strip-mall – ugly, cheap, degraded. Out of laziness and self-inflation, we homogenize even pungent slang into meaninglessness. Here’s how Geoffrey Hill, a gifted re-animator of clichés, particularly in Speech! Speech!, expressed it in The Lords of Limit:

“It seems to be a modern fallacy that `living speech’ can be heard only in intimate situations; in fact the clichés and equivocations of propaganda or of `public relations’ are also part of the living speech of a society.”

On Monday, a graduate student wrote in an e-mail that his research has “high impact scientific, commercial and societal applications.” Nice kid, smart engineer, lousy writer. Not a word in that phrase corresponds to anything in cold reality, and “societal” – a refugee from sociology – deserves banishment. Clichés signal poverty of imagination and spirit, and the only thing “high impact” has any business modifying is polystyrene.