Why Nothing We Say Sounds Original

The other day, I sat down to write a card for a friend’s birthday. To my horror, what should’ve been a sincere, 3-minute word vomit took me an entire afternoon.

A birthday card sounds stupidly simple. Just write your heart out! But whenever I take that blank card out of the envelope, somehow all those memories of watching Dude, Where’s My Car? when we were high, sharing a beer on the couch while watching American Fiction and laughing hysterically at French dick jokes collapse into empty platitudes like:

‘You’re my best friend!’

‘I can’t believe you’re in my life!’

‘Here’s to another legendary year!’

After 3 failed drafts, I realised that our language is plagued with platitudes to the point where we now struggle to articulate anything beyond them. In writing, we call them clichés, and they’re named after the clicking sound of stereotypes against paper in a printing press.

And this isn’t just a 21st-century problem. One of the most vocal critics of clichés was Gustav Flaubert. During his time in the 19^th Century, he noticed that certain phrases and words were so overused to the point where they turned into cultural memes.

Here are some memes from Flaubert’s Bourgeois France:

COFFEE: Induces wit. After a big dinner party, should be drunk standing up. Drinking it without sugar is very smart: it gives the impression that you have lived in the East.

CRITIC: Always 'eminent'. Supposed to know everything, to have read everything, to have seen everything. When you dislike him, call him a Zoilus, a eunuch.

DARWIN: The fellow who says we're descended from monkeys.

The best part of the story is that apparently, this list of clichés was so long that Flaubert kicked the bucket (oops, another cliché!) before he finished compiling it. And the book was later named: The Dictionary of Received Ideas: An Encyclopaedia of Human Stupidity.

Now, I think Flaubert was being a little Harsh, and author/academic Namwali Serpell agrees with me. But instead of writing a 700-word newsletter as I did, she wrote a dense, 30-page article titled ‘A Heap of Clichés’ that defended clichés. She argued that clichés have nothing to do with communicating complex ideas. In fact, they’re performative phrases/words that act as mental shortcuts, and it’s easier to understand each other when we use them.

Moreover, clichés supply us with ready-made sentences that free up extra space for us to talk about the important stuff. Without them, we’ll all be chewing our knuckles over the first line of an email for hours. (To whom it may concern…)

However, even after seeing both sides of the arguments, I still struggled to write that birthday card. If I reinvent a cliché, I’ll confuse a friend. If I reach for the warehouse of accepted platitudes, the letter will sound painfully generic.

After a while, I came to terms with this paradox of writing: we’re all borrowing something from somewhere, but there’s always room to push our words a little further. I won’t get arrested by the language police if a sachet of clichés slips out of my wallet, but that’s not an excuse to litter them all over a birthday card for someone I care about.

The same goes for everything else we write. When in doubt, give a little more of yourself. Don’t just say: I’m proud to be your friend; try: I love that you always have excellent taste in socks. And even for something generic like a cover letter, don’t stop at I admire the company’s value; try: the job ad was so well-written that I wanted to see more.

No, we won’t get rid of clichés anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop there. The beauty of writing is that we can take phrases that are already there and, like most things in life, leave them better than how we found them (another cliché!).

Until next week

Robin