The temptation to be clever when writing about language, or to lean on well-worn words, is practically impossible for any writer to resist.
Take clichs, for example, those hackneyed phrases and words. Look clich up in excellent reference books and you will find the authors spinning out paragraphs of vapid phraseology to make their point.
“They are all things to all men,” wrote the authors of the “New York Times Manual of Style and Usage” while addressing the issue of clichs. “Many are beneath contempt, but some are all to the good; they lend a helping hand and add insult to injury.” The tendency to sling clichs around overwhelms even the cautious. Look for them in The Bee, including this column. You find them everywhere.
Weeks ago, prompted by the heroic efforts of an editor at the Los Angeles Times, I invited Bee readers to spot the most-used clichs in this newspaper. (I know “most-used clich” is redundant, but I meant to emphasize the point.) At least a dozen readers responded immediately, and several journalists had been waiting for a chance to speak up.
With their help, I created a list of this newspaper’s favorite clichs. There was, alas, no shortage of material. I checked all nominations against the electronic files of The Bee, but quit looking beyond five years. The method used was more likely to undercount than to overcount, which is a very scary thought.
The Bee’s dirty dozen
The Bee’s three favorite clichs appeared in print more than 7,000 times in the past five years. Check my math, but that means these phrases together averaged almost four times (3.8) every day for five years.
Assistant Managing Editor Scott Lebar, who runs Metro, starts to look slightly manic when he thinks about it. “It’s a peculiar obsession,” he said of his zeal to spot clichs in a news story, “… because I think it’s part of the roots of bad writing …. Seems to me that writers, with the drive for originality, would want to avoid these phrases simply because everyone else is using them.”
He admitted he has “been on a mission — my apologies if that is a clich — to rid our copy of clichs.” Lebar nominated two of the top three. Reader Sid Salinger of Roseville spotted the champion clich. Here’s the list:
No. 1: “Bottom line,” nominated by Salinger and affirmed by several others. This phrase has been printed in The Bee 2,638 times in the five-year file, which means you should be able to find it somewhere every single day, and twice on weekends if that’s what you want to find in your newspaper. Some days it actually referred to the profit or loss of a company, but most often it was lazy slang for almost anything from the price of a car to limits on sexual harassment.
No. 2: “At a time when,” also written in The Bee as “in a time when,” “in an era when,” and the strangest version of all, “in an era where.” One of Lebar’s favorites, this showed up slightly more than 2,500 times (I gave up counting variations) and in every section of the paper. “It is just an easy out for connecting the specific with the universal,” he said. “Ask anyone in the newsroom who has dealt with me and they will tell you how much I loathe this phrase. Newsrooms everywhere love this.” Try writing the sentence without this phrase and see what happens, he said. Other editors agree this shows a writer is straining to make a connection between elements, sometimes when there is none.
No. 3: “To be sure,” the other Lebar favorite, appeared 1,875 times, fills space and communicates nothing. “We use it as an idiotic transition,” he said. “It means nothing,” he grumped. He calls this “the latest verbal spackle to infiltrate copy.”
No. 4: “Critics say” appeared 983 times, and was nominated by Deputy Managing Editor Mort Saltzman. “This is often used by writers who want to spin the story toward criticism and generally have talked to one critic (two at best) who is cited in the story.” Readers suspect anonymous “critics” are a mask for a journalist’s personal convictions.
No. 5: “World-class” was printed 856 times and is a favorite modifier in sports, but has appeared everywhere in the paper. Elizabeth Kuehner spotted this. It has been applied to everything from sports facilities to motel rooms, and once described a man who worked too hard at his job, though he was hardly an international competitor.
Too close to home
No. 6: “Good news … bad news” was spotted by a reader and had appeared 588 times. (I am a little sensitive about this one, since I always believed this was terrifically clever and used it often.)
No. 7: “Cutting edge,” also spotted by Kuehner, popped up 446 times, almost never dealing with a knife.
No. 8: “Center around” made it into The Bee 444 times, and reader Richard Andrew Kowaleski of Orangevale pointed out it “cannot be done.” You either “center on (or upon),” or “revolve around,” he said.
No. 9: “faux,” one of my least favorite words to appear in newspapers, appeared 423 times in The Bee, nine times since I ridiculed it unsuccessfully in this column earlier. You could make an argument this is not a true clich, only pretentious use of a French word.
No. 10: “Sleepy,” nominated by Managing Editor Joyce Terhaar, appeared in various forms — “sleepy little town” is popular. It turned up more than 300 times in the paper. “I cringe every time I see the word,” she said.
No. 11: “Raised eyebrows” is driving Lebar nuts to the point he is starting to picture eyebrows going up all around him in the newsroom. Eyebrows have been raised 232 times, if you believe The Bee.
No. 12: “Paradigm” was the “humble suggestion” of reader Diane Pigg, bless her, to which we all shout “AMEN!” This ostentatious word appeared 212 times in The Bee. I hated this since it first oozed out of the mouth of a philosophy professor at Michigan several decades ago. I still worry in my sleep about all those paradigms shifting, out there, somewhere.
What is a shrift?
Many other excellent candidates were nominated.
“Short shrift,” was proposed via e-mail from a reader. “What is a shrift, anyway?” she asked. (A short shrift is the brief amount of time granted a condemned prisoner for confession or absolution, which is not how The Bee used it 127 times. A shrift is the act of confession or absolution.) And other Bee readers spotted: “at first blush” 100 times, “competitive fires” 47 times, “windows of opportunity” over 200 times, “poster child” 159 times, “at the end of the day” (from reader George Henry) 96 times, “eye candy” 30 times, “being there for someone” (reader Ed Booth from Chico) 37 times, ideas “outside the box” 18 times, “point in time” 195 times, and “too close for comfort” 51 times.
The word clich is derived “from the French word clicher, which means “to stereotype,” which came from the German word klitsch, which originally meant “patterned in clay.” Webster’s New World Collegiate Dictionary says a clich is “a stereotype printing plate (archaic)” or “an expression or idea that has become trite.”
The late Prof. John Bremner, in his book “Words on Words,” had this to say: “Speech is often riddled with clichs because people speak faster than they think and because they think in phrases rather than words … At their creation, the phrases were original and bright. Down the years, they have become worn out with use. What we need are new clichs,” he said.
We’re working on it, Professor.
“The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage” says: “… faddishness, in writing as in raiment, is so hard to resist. But it must be resisted…” I agree. The goal of newspaper writing should be to convey information as smoothly and concisely as possible to the reader. Clichs block the movement of readers through stories, forcing them to stop reading and start gnashing their teeth before attempting to resume the journey to the end. Most won’t bother.
So, why don’t newspapers eliminate these things? With a few exceptions, we are too trendy, too rushed, too lazy and too egotistical to see our own flaws, particularly when we think we are clever. Lebar and his companions in the war on clichs may make progress, but I remain pessimistic. I expect to find him, 10 years from now, mumbling “to be sure, to be sure” in a corner of the newsroom.
What to do? Keep trying.
Make lemonade out of these lemons.
Use The Bee’s worst clichs to create an awesome folk/blues song: “To be sure, my bottom line centers around the cutting edge of your paradigm … At a time when my good news is your bad news, I’ll be there for you (baby, baby, baby).” Write your own tune.
