Cliches

I think cliches are underrated.

What I have in mind is that the best cliches are packing up wisdom from common life experiences into pithy expressions. For example, “when someone tells you who they are, believe them” is a cliche. If you’ve ever been betrayed by someone after they acted dishonestly and you ignored it, this cliche has a very precise meaning, and it evokes a useful set of emotional experiences and, most importantly, a certain wisdom that tells you how to act in a range of situations.

I think people dislike cliches for four reasons:

first, they get used a lot because they refer to extremely common situations, and people tend to dislike repetition like this
second, if you happen not to have had the experiences a cliche refers to, they don’t evoke the requisite emotions or wisdom
third, cliches make bad prose. In his essay on rules for writing, George Orwell says that you should “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print”. So yeah, cliches sound bland.
fourth, there’s no “alpha” in the wisdom contained in a cliche. Either you have the experience, and you already know the thing, or you haven’t, in which case it probably sounds so obvious that it bounces off you, at best suggesting there’s some mysterious thing that doesn’t really seem important and which someone is being all highfalutin about

None of these are reasons to categorically dislike cliches, though they suggest ways in which they are easy to misuse.

If you look at cliches as a communication tool for indexing into someone else’s bag of life experiences, and are careful to check that the other person has had that sort of experience before doing so, then you can evoke a very precise and complex set of emotions and experiences. The real trick is knowing when to do so.

One of the most effective leaders I’ve ever worked with (Robin Carnahan) had a handful of catchphrases that became, at USDR, essentially cliches. But she explained each one of them in context enough times that everyone knew what they meant. And then, in conversations where we were unsure about what to do, Robin would often know precisely which catchphrase to draw out that would crystallize a shared understanding of what to do.

Perhaps that’s the point: we use the term cliche when we want a derogatory perspective, and we use the term catchphrase when we want to say something nice about the same thing. And I think that the broad category of “things that are often called cliches” is a bag of underrated and useful catchphrases.