Quoting one of the language masters, “below is a list of 50 clichés which are still in daily use despite the fact that their edges are becoming increasingly blunt”. Terse statement you will agree with me that needs no further explanation because truth is, we have gotten so use to them that they no longer matter so long as we are understood in our day-day exchange of ideas or opinions. Be it the spoken or the written English, the same treatment applies. The ground-rules and standards must be observed. There are no two ways about it; no compromise, or shifting of grounds. As I often write, the Standard English should be separated from pidgin or what the pragmatists call smattering English. The audiences are different. Pidgin English, in most cases, targets the not too sophisticated and less schooled people, in the sense of western education, who constitute a greater percentage of the rural areas, while the Standard English, or what others would refer to as the Queen’s English, is for the upscale and educated class. And so, we are left with no option but to do the desirable by catering for this group of individuals who should know and able to use the language of mass communication to send the right message to the consuming audience. Here we are again, poised to begin or continue our countdown to the 50 top clichés that most times we are ignorant about or totally forget to dump them and go for something fresher and clear enough to stand us out of the crowd.
The majority of us like to mimic or in our local parlance, follow, follow others, those I call the offenders of the language to popularise these infamous clichés that no longer make much impact because they have been overused overtime. Their edges are blunt and ineffective. So, note them and place them where they belong, as clichés. Don’t get excited henceforth when you come across phrases such as, “add insult to injury”, “as a matter of fact”, “as well as can be expected”, “at the end of your tether”, and “avoid like a plague”. Now, the list may appear inexhaustible when I attempt to go beyond the 50 known hackneyed statements. To keep them reasonably low, let’s stay with the 50 identified ones. But as we go on and list the 50 clichés, others would follow in due time. Sample these spent phrases and see how you can rephrase or rewrite them to suit what you intend to say or the message you want to pass across to the reading and listening population. The assignment is for every one of us not just for the columnist to ponder about. Where possible, I would also like to hear from you or get a feedback. The beauty of this assignment is to enable you expand your vocabulary rather than get stuck to the old way of doing things. Recycling clichés is a clear indication that one is not moving at all to break new grounds. Unfortunately, some of our writers, journalists and reporters are caught in this web of repetitive statements that bore some of us, including the masters of the word or language.
Among the revealed worn out expressions that still sit pretty well on the pages of the newspapers, and of course, dominates the airwaves on the daily and hourly basis; check these out, speak and write less of them, and where possible kill them completely and look for statements that would unambiguously take your message to the target audience. In short, one can rewrite them; “be that as it may”, “born and bred”, “by hook or by crook”, “a chapter of accidents”, “chop and change”, “conspicuous by its absence”, “to cut a long story short”, “the dim and distant past”, and “down your sorrows”. We may have to pause here and continue next week, except I am not distracted to do other things. As I said before now, change is inevitable. Now that politicking has taken centre stage, let’s avoid using the stale phrase, “flag bearer” when referring to the Presidential candidates of the All Progressives Congress, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples’ Democratic Party and Peter Obi of Labour Party. Call them the standard bearers or torch-bearers of their respective political parties; even as the winner of the 2023 Presidential poll emerges.
