Why
to Avoid Clichés like the Plague
Firm advice from an itinerant
freelancer
Something
was new under the sun in this Happy Valley of milk and honey when I tiptoed on
eggs into the newspaper office. Knowing the jig was up; the board of directors
confronted me, “Jim we would like to know what’s new in your brave world of Banholzerian
scandal sheets. Which begs the question; can you spare us more than a few
nanoseconds of your attention span for some whys and wherefores?”
They
led me through some flowery purple passages, where we circled up for a showdown.
This would be no kid glove treatment. But, what the hey? No pain, no gain! One
kind-hearted Central Pennsylvanian scrutinizer remarked at length, “Son, your
imagination runs riot, but I’ve told you a million times that you’re prone to
hyperbole. By the same token, some of your sentences are so very long that by
the time readers get around to your end point, few remember what you were
writing about in the first place and believe you me with the instant
gratification expectations that today’s world has developed for digests,
buzzwords and Tweets, your style is going to come off sounding like a bunch of half-baked
ideas grasping at straws.”
“I
catch your drift and don’t forget the memory hole”, I retorted, “prions pouring
right down the drain”. Perhaps I should even out my long-winded lexicon with
some good old hackneyed phrases. I think we see eye to eye that the man I’m
replacing has some hard shoes to fill. Harder than Chinese Algebra -without an
abacus. But let’s dream the impossible dream and say I’m able to keep the ball
rolling between the lines for readers. What then? Need I develop an algorithmic
formula that does the trick to blow them away?”
“Well”,
one of my mentors suggested, “you’re not out of the woods yet. It’s more than
wishful thinking to say that if you were to modify several clichés and hang
them from a string together, you could come up with something original. Like
pinning your hopes on duck soup. Many trite expressions are used because the
author is lazy as a dog. Certainly not every word spilling out of your keyboard
can be a coal pressed gem, but you should at least strive for some originality
in this state.”
So,
I’ll put my money where my mouth is, starting with one red cent. By and large
it will become easy as pie to roll in the dough from that sweetened pot at this
end of the rainbow. I’d bet my bottom dollar that if I’m to write commentary on
subjects like “Beaver Stadium Was Not Built in One Day” then mixing bolt from
the blue clichés with sassy language could become the technique to get ‘er
done. We’ll run it up the liberty pole to see who salutes it.
The
Bossman walked in shouting, “Eureka! Young (middle-aged) James you’ve solved a
puzzle! It’s refreshing to see beyond the end of your nose that while you
couldn’t beat conformity you didn’t join it. Otherwise it would have been back
to the drawing board. You’d have been writing on the wall methods for putting
toothpaste back in tubes and genies into bottles no place like home. Best to
not have to open that can of worms.”
“Well,
you do have to be a pretty early bird to snag a silkworm and pull the wool over
my eyes with it.” Seeing it through, I knew that the sun always shines after a
hard rain, even if it’s pitchforks. A real cat and dog gully washer always
makes it fun to watch the golf greens grow.
I
was happy as a clam that the editors didn’t pop a vein while having a mad cow
over my unconventional efforts. They didn’t consider this bunch of blather to be over the top! I wouldn’t want poor
planning on my part to create an emergency on theirs and get swept under the
rug. So while I’m burning midnight ethanol worth its weight in gold and
shooting for the moon, I’ll apply these newfangled methods during crunch time,
hoping my verbiage doesn’t get caught between a rock and a hard place. This
straight from the mouth of the horse of a different colour, who laughed last at
himself for trying to be too clever by halfsies.
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