I love clichés.

                  Clichés are language at work. They’ve got a history, like abraded pennies (remember pennies?). They’ve seen better days. Usage has worn them to within an inch of their lives. They get no respect. They’re not beautiful anymore. Their salad days are over.

                  Deploying clichés unwittingly, we’re taught, demonstrates ignorance, so no go. Bobby Burns could liken his love to a red, red rose, but only imitators after. Greeting card racks sizzle with fatuous fizzle. “You’re the best granddad ever!” “I love you more than life itself.”

                  Clichés boomerang if unintended. Calling one’s squeeze sweetie-pie, pumpkin, my one-and-only, as if you’d originated the phrases, inadvertently depicts a copy-cat passion. Fresh experience yearns for fresh utterance. But it’s not so easy. Can’t you feel Ecclesiastes chewing his stylus when he groaned,

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?

And yet, because he spoke his heart – and was a crackerjack poet, albeit a grump – he did make it new, new enough to fast-forward his scribblings twenty-five-hundred years (be still, my heart!).

                  Clichés, by definition, say what’s been said before, but without energy for originality, exposing both speaker and their words to unwonted (and unwanted) scrutiny. Doesn’t the “Snookums” and “Cuddle-bug” hubby, home late from the office, make you suspicious? What is he hiding behind that plastic palisade?

                  Literalizing a cliché funds many a joke. Amelia Bedelia (you didn’t expect her here, did you?) when drawing the drapes, draws them; ditto, dressing the chicken, and dusting the furniture. My favorite cliché-whetted-to-a-stiletto comes from Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio, an incorrigible kidder, mortally wounded, gasps, “Tomorrow you shall find me a grave man.” (That’s the sort of Shakespeare trick that makes writers tear their hair out. For all my tearing, I still – remarkably – have a scalpful.)

                  Every cliché, like every oldster, has a story worth learning, though few are asked. How often have I quizzed a stranger at a dinner party on their past, only to be assured it was nothing interesting, same old, dull as dishwater, old hat, and I was only inquiring – insultingly! – out of boredom. Au contraire, ma vieille amie, who you’ve been and how you came to be is infinitely more interesting than all this jabber about weather, videos, and the Nameless One! (My inquisitive zeal may explain why I’m not invited back – “He makes people uncomfortable with all those questions!”)

                  A cliché introduced knowingly, with a wink, establishes an implicit intimacy – you and I are in on the joke, which might escape the observation of the less alert. We like those who are like us (birds of a feather flock together) and derive comfort from solidarity with the sane (by sane I mean right as rain). I am always winking, you may have noticed, sprinkling old words, big words, fat words, new words, to sparkle your day. I’ve nothing new to report – mankind is still making the same stupid mistakes Ecclesiastes bemoaned, only more of them. Yet fresh expression sparks hope we might – for a joyous instant – escape our rut.

                  With luck a cliché, like Mercutio’s, might jolt us to fresh perception – in his case the haunting likeness of solemnity to death. Notwithstanding the gravity of headlines, we must not be too grave, for we will be there soon enough. Let us have a ball – and stay on the ball – even as our ball revolves to its doom.