Language Use That Really Annoys Me #2 - Over-Used Cliches.

I hate spoken cliches. When someone says, 'well, y'know, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, and - I'm not being funny but - like, you what I mean?' I want to stab them. In the head, with a tent spike. Or possibly just shoot them. If America is to be hated for anything, it is for the hideous over-use of the term 'what-not'. But then, the French keep going 'alors' and Cheryl 'I sound like Sid The Sexist in Drag' Cole probably intersperses every four f**king words with 'like', so the tendency is universal.

Why? It suggests lazy thinking. People who keep using the same phrases, time and again, are not using that most-complex-structure-in-the-known-universe that occupies their cranium. Their brains are taking short cuts, they are running on autopilot and - worst of all - they're just speaking someone else's words. They are not functioning as people, but as automotons, or jukeboxes playing the greatest verbal hits of someone much more creative.

The worst ones are however created by the individual who then proceeds to overuse them so they never need structure an original sentence again. For example, I knew one idiot who kept using the word 'intransigence' to the point that you had to wonder if that was the first four syllable word they had ever said and their tiny minds couldn't cope with the stress. 'Negative' or 'negativity' is another overused one, as is 'solutions', but so too are potted ideological arguments for people too stupid for ideology, like 'political correctness gone mad!' or 'if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear'. It even has a social cost - think of all those families ruined by 'my house, my rules!' or 'you're not going out dressed like that!'(and so on) vs. 'you don't understand me!' or 'I hate you!' or 'You're So Unfair!'. All too often, we venture into life as individuals with our own thoughts and viewpoints, and yet in the end we are reduced to stock phrases, archetypes and echoes of echoes of echoes, playing out prealloted roles with prealloted dialogue...

Lazy use of cliches is profoundly annoying, but it's also dehumanising too. But, y'know, it's like 'what-evvaaaaar', innit?