I recently spent some time
cat sitting for a friend. In the process, I managed to get in a few hours of
television watching, something that takes up very limited amount of time in my
home. After messing around with the remote for a while, I discovered many shows
and people I had never heard of before. Now ordinarily, this would not bother
me ... but it did make me realize that cutting the cable and relying on just
two networks (one of which is public television), I was getting close to the
morass of ignorance with regard to what is going on in the world beneath the
heavy veil of politics.
Not only did I discover a
whole world of reality personalities, cooking celebrities, and detailed
forensic methods for murdering women, I discovered also that either the writers
or the unscripted dialogs have created a new wave of clichés or there is very
little creative effort by media.
I call this phenomenon "modern
clichés" because while the combination of words has not been around as
long as the true cliché, the rampant overuse leads me to believe I can call
them clichés.
In just a week, I heard these
worn phrases while surfing various channels and shows.
- Think outside the box. Really? How many times have you used this?
- Kick it up a notch. Now this one was used six times on six different cooking related shows.
- You know what I'm saying? This is kind of like adding "you know" to your statements.
- I'm just saying. (Don't we know what you are saying; after all, you just said it.)
- I mean. (Have you noticed how many speakers answer questions by using these two words to preface their responses?)
- It is what it is. Ah, this needs no further discussion.
- To be honest ... (Oh, so otherwise what you have to say is dishonest?)
- I cannot even ... (I cannot even think of what this means!)
- That's a game changer.
- That's my final answer. (Is that show still on TV?)
Now, the 2nd Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) has 21,728 pages in 20 volumes. I have no
idea how many words that equals but I would wager it is at least 13,000,000.
Not surprisingly, English-speaking Americans use only (an estimated) 3,000 of 20
volumes of words.
I
realize that broadcast media has to get a message across quickly, but I wonder
if they assume the public will not be able to understand what they are trying
to convey if they use more than the 3,000 words.
Surely
with this many words available to us, we could cease employing these "clichés"
and become more descriptive.
