'Dictionary of Dead Words'

How to account for the enduring appeal of clichés? Why do we snub the riches of our language? I’ve always supposed it was laziness or the absence of imagination. Why work hard at writing or speaking when a ready-made word, phrase or thought shows up automatically, like pain with a heart attack? Many seem deaf to the resonant clunk of a banality.  

Consider the perfectly useful words one can no longer use – community, granular and, of course, awesome. Or the newly repurposed (itself a cliché) words that arrived stillborn – existential, epic, iconic, spiritual (as an anemic substitute for religious). And the phrases -- it is what it is, breaking down silos, people person. Especially embarrassing is when an otherwise fairly intelligent person not only uses a cliché but savors it as though he were voicing the Delphic Oracle. No wonder ChatGPT, which amounts to industrialized cliché production, is so fashionable.

There’s nothing new about our weakness for clichés, of course, as the American literary journalist John Macy writes ninety-five years ago in The Bookman. In 1928, the New English Dictionary, known to us as the Oxford English Dictionary, had just been published. In “Fewer and Better Words” Macy writes:

 

“This vast thesaurus probably contains sufficient words and phrases to express our most profound and original thoughts. It seems a proper time to put to sleep for a long, long rest some words and usages which are very tired or were crippled or feebleminded to start with. I suggest a preliminary list for a Dictionary of Dead Words.”

 

Macy suggests doing away with that favorite among cop reporters, slay as a synonym for murder. And “keen, as applied to sense of humor.” And “crass, wedded to stupidity.” Macy thus identifies the habitual coupling of an adjective with a given noun, a bastardized variation of the Homeric epithet (“rosy-fingered Dawn”), which once was epic. Another example: Today, we use lurid to mean scandalous or sordid. Macy reminds us that it was being used a century ago “apparently as if the writer thought it meant something like vivid or highly colored. It really means pale yellow, wan, gray, quite the opposite of highly colored. A good word to put in the morgue.”

Macy closes with a true but hackneyed bit of advice: “But I had better stop giving advice and look alive to my own vocabulary. Every writer must decide for himself what worn words to throw into the discard.” Have many clichés do you count in those two sentences?