Member-only story
Clichés That Kill
If we’re all thinking the same things and using the same uninspired and unexamined language, then no one is thinking at all — and that’s dangerous.
Recently I began listening to the world through a filter I was calling originality, but it took a bad turn: originality was hard to come by in normal, even serious, conversation. Instead I heard clichés used far more frequently than I would have expected, and I began to cringe at the ideas lost, wrong actions taken, bad interpretations of motivation and reason that came about because these over-used and shallow phrases were amounting to a worldview of sorts — a dangerous shorthand that wasn’t meant to be a moral code but somehow became exactly that. It was so easy to fall into the trap: people understood you right away, heads nodded, you didn’t need to elaborate, the wisdom seemed battle-tested and ready to go. Except: whose battle and exactly where did we mean to go with these quasi-eternal semi-truths? Here I rank those I heard most often in reverse order of severity, going from the annoying to the catastrophic. I’m nowhere near done with all the powerful but misguided language, and the behavior it encourages, that we perpetuate without thinking. If we demonstrate more courage and originality in our analysis of situations, we should find that solutions to our challenges are more comprehensive and enduring. I could make a regular column out of this.
