Trite and tested phrases save us a lot of time and verbal trouble
In London, locals enquire of us if the cold and rainy spell of what they call ‘unsettled weather’ is unsettling us. And when that gives way to a scorching heatwave, they welcome the ‘good weather’.
Sweltering heat with no ACs and hardly any proper fans to speak of, making it impossible to get a decent night’s sleep, ‘good weather’?
We reply that the cold and wet, which is customary and unsettling for them, and the blazing sun and heat are welcome. For us, it’s the other way round because, in a North Indian summer, we get too much sun and heat and not enough coolth. So what they call bad weather, we deem good weather.
The grass is always greener on the other side, I tell the locals. And having said it, I wonder why I use such a hackneyed phrase that has become a cliché.
Couldn’t I find a better way to put it? What about: What’s desirable and what’s undesirable depends on your point of view?
No. That doesn’t have the evocative resonance of grass and its differing shades of green, which is the colour of envy.
What we would do without our clichés that put succinct words in our mouth without our having to struggle to find them? Clichés, the commonplace coinage of communication, are labour-saving devices when we express ourselves.
Every cloud has a silver lining. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Actions speak louder than words. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
That verbal wizard, Shakespeare, is said to have coined over 1700 terms and phrases we use today. Wild goose chase. Break the ice. Good riddance. Love is blind. Heart of gold.
Over the years his unmatched linguistic ingenuity has swelled the plebeian ranks of clichédom.
Without our clichés we would be left struggling to invent a wheel of words with which to convey our meaning. Should such a wheel be triangular? Rectangular? Oval?
The hell with it. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. That invention has also been turned into a useful cliché.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
