Beating a Dead Horse: Cliches are like Ants — Everywhere

At the end of the day, it’s time to stand up and throw in the towel before we’re taken down a peg or two. This sentence is just one cliché after another and, as such, it is typical of much thought today. The use of hackneyed phrases like playing one’s cards right and reading between the lines is a lazy person’s way of navigating.

I’ve noticed this recent rise in the use of clichés when listening to commentary on news broadcasts. The program’s anchor will call on the beat reporter saying he or she will “tell us what’s happening on the ground.”  Given the number of referrals, that ground must be quite littered. What do we get when we reach ground-level? We’re often given a lame assessment: despite “hitting the ground running” it’s “all hard to swallow” and “the jury is still out.”

Such tired exchanges leave me — and likely other listeners — unfulfilled and vaguely irritated. I became sensitive to clichés years ago when working for the late Jack de Yonge, then the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s editorial page editor. A cliché hater, De Yonge would reject his colleagues’ editorial drafts whenever he found the writer guilty of relying too heavily on a bunch of “shopworn” phrases.

Getting a draft rejected by him was never humdrum; it was usually communicated with colorful language. He had strong views and prejudices along with his anti-cliché fetish. He often used the rejection as a time to restate some of his quirky and novel theories. For example: When it came to predicting the winner of an election, he declared the tallest candidate would win and, in fact, the tallest contender always wins. That was something of a self-serving premise for someone who stood 6-foot-seven. When appropriate, Jack would enlarge on his formula for pre-judging outcomes, saying the contest would go to the tallest candidate with the best hair.

That assumption is not quite as useful now since today’s candidates for office are as apt to be women and, as such, likely to be shorter and have expensively tended hair.

But political conjecture aside, De Yonge’s cliché hatred was the foremost factor in determining his era’s editorial view. No longer could an editorialist complain that a certain politician had erred by not “playing his cards right” or by failing to “come out with guns blazing” in attempts to “get a foot in the door” with “a shoestring budget.” It was best to refrain from being “all talk and no action” or even being “all over the map.”

If today we were following the De Yonge doctrine, what would matter most is not “burying your head in the sand” and not “beating a dead horse.” Instead it would be all about “getting your ducks in a row” and proving that “in this dog eats dog world,” every dog will have his day.