The Generational Cliche: Then You Saw It; Now They Don't.

In "Cliches: Error Recognition or Subjective Reality?" (College English, February 1982), I tried to demonstrate that often we errone ously assume that our students can recognize cliches in their prose, and consequently we are tempted to treat these cliches as errors. For the study I selected 41 expressions from the lists of "Common Cliches" published in several current composition texts and devised a cloze test survey in which respondents were asked to supply the final word of each cliche. The survey revealed that 120 college freshmen could recognize no more than 50% of the "common cliches." It also revealed that there may exist such a linguistic phenomenon as a generational cliche: a figure of speech once considered a cliche but which now, having fallen into disuse, is no longer by definition a cliche?an over worked figure of speech. For example, during the 1930's the expres sion "snappy roadster" was a cliche, but now one rarely hears the expression. If generational cliches do exist, as this present study strongly suggests, we must redefine not only our conceptions of cliches but also our pedagogical approaches to them. Aside from numerous textbook declarations that cliches should be avoided, little has been written about cliche use; in fact, no substantive research has yet been published. Clearly, the most sophis ticated, in-depth treatment of the subject is Anton C. Zijderveld's speculative study, On Cliches: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (London: Roultedge and Keegan Paul, 1979). Approach ing the subject from the perspective of a sociologist, Zijderveld argues that as expressions become hackneyed, their meanings are lost but