Rick's List
Older folks might remember the Cliché Project, a think tank organized in the 1920s by a variety of novelists, journalists and early radio baseball announcers. The idea? It was tiring to have to think of new ways to describe recurring situations. Wouldn’t it be easier just to use a finite set of phases that everyone recognized?
“Plus, we all liked the way the word ‘hackneyed’ sounded, but there weren’t that many opportunities to use it,” wrote Rudyard Kipling, who, by the way, was the guy who came up with “going to hell in a handbasket,” a true sparkler of cliché-dom. (It took Kipling several drafts to come up with “going to hell in a handbasket”; earlier attempts included “going to hell in a walrus costume” and “going to the southeastern corner of New Mexico in a handbasket.”)
By now, it’s impossible to be awake at any minute in our world and not subject oneself to an emetic flow of clichés, which is something Cliché Project members actually predicted.
“No good can ultimately come of what we’re doing. We’ll destroy the human mind,” warned Dorothy Parker after a well-lubricated Project Happy Hour during which special guest Winston Churchill, estimating the inebriation leval of the assemblage, cracked, “We’re all drunk as lords!” The phrase stuck!
Ah, well, ours is a culture built around sloth, self-entitlement and convenience — don’t get me wrong, these are good things — and so clichés are more valuable than ever. In that spirit, it’s perhaps amusing to look at the history of history’s more indelible clichés. 1 No less than John Steinbeck circulated a memo to Cliché Project members that “It might be a clever idea to always preface the actual word ‘cliché’ with a phrase such as ‘tired old’ — thereby creating a cliché about clichés.” 2 A situation is so appalling that a now-deceased principal in the original circumstances “must be spinning in his/her grave.” This was a collaboration between novelist Pearl S. Buck and inventor George Washington Carver. The first version was that so-and-so “must be doing the Act Three pas de deux from ‘Don Quixote’ in his/ her grave” but, after discussing design schematics with casket-builders, determined that “spinning” or “turning over” might be more a more plausible visual. 3 ”We gave 110 percent!” Logician Kurt Gödel and sportswriter Red Barber laughed heartily when they came up with this one — predicting it would become a rote observation by athletes and coaches. “The beauty is that the athlete is attempting to describe maximum effort,” Gödel chortled, and Barber chimed in, “but at the same time they’re employing percentages to refer to a part of a whole — and so it’s not possible!” 4 “Dog days of summer” was very nearly “ptarmigan days of summer.”