Glacial Errata, No. 69

One

A few weeks ago, I happened upon this book, A Dictionary of Clichés, by Eric Partridge, originally published in 1940. Partridge updated it multiple times throughout his life, but this is a rather cheap edition from 1963, and I fell in love with it immediately, in no small part because of this amazing cover, designed by Murray Tinkelman.

Two

Partridge’s goal in gathering up a volume of exhausted turns of phrase is to get us to avoid them; finding their ubiquity “remarkable and rather frightening,” he notes in his introduction that their usage comes from a kind of mental laziness:

“A half-education—that snare of the half-educated and the ready-made—accounts for many; an uncultured, little-reading person sees a stock phrase and thinks it apt and smart; he forgets that its aptness should put him on guard.”

Set aside the classist snobbery here; the snare of the cliché is the seductive belief that it’s good enough. One hits upon it and decides, like a dog sipping coffee in a room on fire, this is fine, and keeps going. It is the hallmark of the imprecise, the hurried and under-thought, the reductive.

Three

A Cliché is a kind of fake-out, I think, because it purports to be illustrative, pretending to conjure some mental image or some striking analogy or turn of phrase—and yet, due to usage and familiarity, it does the opposite, leaving a deadened blank space where such mental image ought to be.

In his “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell in particular singles out clichés as one of the chief problems with bad writing, under the heading of “dying metaphors,” which have “lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves,” a sure sign “that the writer is not interested in what he’s saying.”

For Orwell, the stakes are a bit more serious. His essay—which I first read in 1996 and have come back repeatedly in the past thirty years (I would say that, alongside Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, and Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” Orwell’s is the essay that most clarified to me what I wanted to do with my writing)—makes it clear that such stylistic choices are not just about class snobbery or nice prose. Dead writing, Orwell warns us, is one way in which power seeks to efface its brutality.

When Karoline Leavitt, for example, tells the nation, “As President Trump shared with the American people last night, the United States military is making tremendous strides towards achieving our military objectives for Operation Epic Fury. 10 days in, this campaign has been a resounding success thus far, and America's warriors are winning this important fight at an even faster pace than we anticipated,” it is the emptiness of her words that matter as much as anything else. Her determination to fill space with phrases that dull the senses through habituation—”tremendous strides,” “resounding success,” “an even faster pace than we anticipated”—are meant to bludgeon any real thought, bombarding the mind with enough repetitive inanities that thoughts struggle to form or cohere. As Orwell says:

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

Four

But anyway, back to A Dictionary of Clichés! Colin, why are you always such a downer in these newsletters. The more time I spent with Partridge’s book, the more it revealed itself to be quite a curious kind of document. After all, it would seem, the whole point of these phrases is that they’re so worn out that they should be avoided—but if that’s the case, then, why do they need defining? What is the value in defining “to have one’s heart in the right place,” or to have “a heart of gold”? Is “in hot water” a particularly difficult idiom for anyone to parse, in 1940, 1963, or now? In laying out these phrases, the meanings of which we all know by heart, page after page, the book becomes a strange performance in redundancies, a sort of mise en abyme of language where the endlessly stultifying nature of the book’s content, delivered with the sober precision of a dictionary, reaches a point of absurdity at some point.

Five

But most interesting to me about this book from 1940, republished in 1963, are the phrases in here that are fairly unknown to me—phrases that, while they may have been clichéd, dying metaphors several decades ago, have since fully died and been forgotten. Now, having passed beyond their usefulness and beyond the point where they may have been once so instantly recognized by both speaker and listener, by both reader and writer, that they were once nothing but empty background noise, the mind now catches on them once again, and they’re once more re-invested with energy. Perhaps not with the same kind of startling imagery that they once possessed, but a strange kind of intensity and delight nonetheless.

Which is to say, sometimes, though it may be but love in a cottage, in such anachronisms a Lucullean banquet may yet be found.