Why I like cliches
CHICAGO » I am an unashamed appreciator of cliches. Maybe it’s because I started out in life as an English language learner, clinging to familiar idioms, or because I was thrilled to hear the language of school spoken at home when my parents practiced their English. Apparently I’m not alone. Lexicographer Orin Hargraves wrote in “It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Cliches”: “Not all expressions deemed familiar enough to be called cliches at one time or another are to be unequivocally shunned. While it is true that a vast number of expressions have become tired through overuse, there is an opportunity to make even the most worn expressions striking and powerful. How do we decide which among many such expressions may be just right for the occasion, or just wrong?” How, indeed. Someday, I’ll write extensively about my parents’ wrangling with their newly adopted tongue and won’t hesitate to describe how lovely it was to hear them say “the blind leading the blind” or to refer to something as “a bed of roses.”
And when you speak one language at home and another at school, you tend to remember the first time you heard such exotic phrases as “salad days,” “beyond the pale” and “cost an arm and a leg.”
This nostalgia and an ear for how everyday working- and middleclass people talk recently sparked a fury in me as I witnessed an author get singed by the East Coast literary police.
In his review of “The Devil Is Here in These Hills,” by James Green, New York Times critic Dwight Garner fawns over this chronicle of labor struggles in West Virginia’s coal mines:
“The story James Green has to tell ... is among the best and largely forgotten American stories. It’s about property rights versus human rights, about hard men and women and about violent conflict. It’s a tale about a working-class insurgency that’s as piney as an Appalachian ballad.”
But after floridly complimenting Green’s prose — “his dead ahead sentences get a dirty job done” — and lauding his scholarship on an underappreciated topic, Garner slams him:
“‘The Devil Is Here in These Hills’ is a good book that should be made better before it appears in paperback. Mr. Green and his editor need to go to war against cliche, to borrow the title of Martin Amis’ essay collection. This book has, more than any I can remember, and I have a long memory for this kind of thing.
“‘Leaps and bounds,’ ‘in a huff,’ ‘howl of protest,’ ‘feeling the heat,’ ‘hue and cry’ (twice) — I could keep going for paragraphs. These are termites that eat away at credibility as well as sensibility. This language needs to be, to borrow three phrases from Mr. Green’s book, nipped at the bud, with an iron fist, so as to work wonders.”
As my dad would say: “Gimme a break!”
Mr. Garner needs to get out of New York and visit the rest of the country — urban, suburban and rural towns alike — and understand that real people, even highly educated ones, talk this way. And though many of us in fly-over country adore literature, we also don’t mind reading stories written in the common language of regular people.
Green, a Yale Ph.D. and a history professor at the University of Massachusetts who, as it turns out, grew up in Carpentersville, Illinois, told me that if he had to write this book over again, he wouldn’t change a thing.
“I had to write this book in the American idiom, with words and phrases that sound familiar to readers, not to critics,” he said.
I aspire to such clarity, too.