Clichéd Clichés

The word “cliché” comes from past participle of the French verb clicher (pronounced just as we pronounce “cliché”: clee-shay), which means to stereotype. The word “stereotype”, now itself a cliché, was first used to refer to a printing technique in which, rather than use the original printing plate, a mold is made of the original and then used to create a copy of the plate, which is then ultimately used in the actual printing process. Thus, a cliché connotes something that has been mass-produced from a copy of an original. It is a copy of a copy, twice removed from truth and twice replicated.

While I hate colonialism, I find it difficult to hate the colonial nature of the English language. First, it’s helpful for everyone to speak a common language. Sure, it’s nice that that language is my first tongue, but I’ve still gone through the effort to learn two additional languages, and I can at least speak French better than most French people can speak English.

I remember one time in Prague, I mentioned to a particularly friendly waiter that I was surprised that everyone in Prague spoke fantastic English. “Of course,” he said. “Who in their right mind would learn Czech, unless they live here?” Given that my trip to Prague was part of a circuitous route home from Paris, I was a little taken aback by the waiter’s frankness. No one in the world was going to learn Czech, so they would buckle down and learn English. The French would never do such a thing.

The second thing I like about the English language’s colonial history is that, unlike, say French, English readily accepts words from the areas it has colonized. Ok, another word for it would be “co-opting”, but I’ll take the charitable view. The fluidity of our language is why we have so many expressions, why we can say “house” and “home” and mean different things. The French have “maison” to mean both, though they can use the somewhat awkward “chez X” construction, which literally means something like “place of X”. But, we can say “chez” to, as in “Chez Louis”. English has something like 600,000 words, compared to 100,000 in French and 200,000 in Spanish. And when another language has a useful word that English lacks, we just take it. Like cliché.

When I write “cliche”, Word changes it automatically to “cliché”. It is strange, I think, that we are unwilling to make cliché a truly English word; we must keep the French accent and pronunciation. We write “oeuvre” instead of “œuvre” and “debut” instead of “début”, why not “cliche”?

I think it has something to do with the word cliché being itself cliché, a sort of mockery of its own pretentiousness. French is clichéd. Who would be caught dead anymore saying “je ne sais quoi” in seriousness, or “raison d’être”? But we don’t translate them, “I don’t know what,” and “reason to be”. We want to keep them out of our language so we are not responsible for them. And cliché, too.

But I think we should accept clichés. They are, like their etymological cousins stereotypes, often based on nuggets of truths. Sometimes when I’m a bad mood I am disgusted at almost everything I think or say. How trite I am, I think. Then, the realization of my own triteness itself becomes trite. And that realization, like I’m the first one to recognize the banality of my realization of my own hackneyed self-doubt, that becomes trite.

And so I enter a spiral (oh, how overused is that image!) of self-hatred that has no end. It is a vicious cycle, a catch-22, etc. etc. And I have to stop myself. I have to accept the fact that in millennia of human history and with more than 6 billion other humans living every second on this planet along with me, that almost every thought I could have has been thought before. Every word I have uttered has been uttered before. And every smart, clever thing I imagine has been imagined before by someone who thought themselves just as smart and clever.

So, the cliché becomes exactly that which ties us together in one humanity. The cliché is the common thread that we should not despise, but celebrate and explore. I am not the first, and will not be the last, 22-year-old who dreams of escaping to foreign lands to find myself and maybe start writing. Indeed, I know several friends in the same position. But the fact that I am not unique in this respect does not mean that my personal experience will not be meaningful. If anything, it will be meaningful to me, and that should be enough, right?

I shouldn’t care how many other people have done the same thing or thought the same thing or said the same things. I shouldn’t care about clichés.