Chambers Clichés and How to Avoid Them

I'm sitting here trying to write a full paragraph without using a cliché, but eventually I have had to throw in the towel. Clichés are so central to our vocabulary, we rarely notice we have used them – here are a few from my recent entries here – 'a tough call', 'born and bred', 'remain in the shadows', 'endless range'. So much for my belief that I was something of a stylist! Clichés and How to Avoid Them is a recent book from Chambers which finds Michael Munro (best known for his books of Glaswegian 'patter') doing battle with the most used and abused of everyday phrases.

As Munro points out in his introduction, nothing brings out the predictable like being put on the spot – the sight of a microphone being poked in the face of a politician, celeb or sports star is a warning that clichés will soon enter the ether. Jobs will be for the chop, gobs will be smacked and Bob, no doubt, is your uncle. Munro is not wholly against the use of stock phrases – they colour our daily speech and act as verbal shortcuts. But I agree with him that some are heavily overused: professional people in particular need to bleed their jargons, business clichés being perhaps the most roundly despised.

The word cliché, in French, comes from the printing trade, and once meant a piece of metal on which was found a phrase so often employed it warranted its existence. This book acts as a sort of thesaurus, where users can look up the phrase they want to avoid and select replacements, either Plain English ones ('be merciless' for 'put the boot in') or fellow clichés, often less familiar alternatives ('back number' for 'fuddy-duddy').

Also included, where known, are the origins of these stock phrases we all use. Unsurprisingly, many of them have been popularised by the Bible ('see eye to eye', 'salt of the earth', thorn in the side', 'give up the ghost'), although adaptations of technical terms and work jargon are common too ('strike while the iron is hot', 'queering a pitch', 'tread the boards'), as are terms from sport and games ('knock spots off', 'different ballgame') and literature ('far from the madding crowd', 'Jekyll and Hyde personality').

At the end of the day (my apologies), Munro's book has three disparate but handy uses. First, it can be used by writers (magazine journalists in particular!) who wish to knock out a few old favourites and freshen up their copy. Secondly, it makes for a pleasant dipping book (aka a bog-side browse). I was glad to see Munro attempting to unravel 'the Full Monty', the most elusive of clichés in its origins (Montgomery's hearty breakfast? A dress suit? Or something more risqué perhaps?).

Amateur word-sleuths like myself will also take pleasure in quibbling with uses and origins, or in supplying those which are not here. I'd like to think sandboys were happy, not as Munro suggests because they freely spent their wages on drink, but because they supplied bars with sand for the floor and often sieved out coins and other valuables from the old sand they removed! And a fly-by-night, I believe, is so-called because in times past, people reserved their greatest distrust for those who supposedly cantered off on a broomstick of an evening!