A few months ago, our daughter-in-law Jessi and I were sitting at the breakfast counter talking about cliches because someone on TV had just used “at the end of the day” in an interview. Jessi said, “Don’t you hate that expression? What is it supposed to mean, anyway?”
Well, that started me thinking about the many cliches we randomly toss into our conversations. I began to wonder if I’d ever actually counted my chickens before they’d hatched, or if I’d ever thrown up a stone and hit two birds, or if actually having a bird in my hand would be worth two in some bush somewhere. Or if at the end of the day, all things being equal, I could think of anything positive to say about cliches.
Cliches are often criticized as the most overused and contemptible phrases in the English language. But I wonder if there might be times when cliches could not only be useful, but might also create a sense of community or camaraderie. And maybe sometimes, only a cliche will do. So allow me to think outside the box and put in my two cents’ worth. (Don’t you love it?)
I think there are definitely two kinds of cliches. There’s the kind of cliche that really is everything that we’ve always been taught that a cliche should be — it’s redundant, it’s repetitive, it’s banal, it’s worn out. It certainly means absolutely nothing in the sentence. It doesn’t really convey any meaning. It sort of serves as a type of punctuation. It’s kind of a rhythmic thing in a sentence.
Expressions like “at the end of the day,” or “all things being equal” are words that you can strip from any sentence, and the sentence will be absolutely none the worse.
So, OK, that’s the bad type of cliche, in my opinion. So, what’s a good cliche? Again, this is just my opinion, but I think really good cliches are the ones that are packed with color and wonderful images, even though we may hear them so frequently that we don’t pause to consider them.
Things like “the elephant in the room” and “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” That sort of cliche often has a really interesting and rich history. Shakespeare created many expressions that have become cliche, and many of them still seem to work just fine to help us express ourselves.
But let’s get back to the cliche Jessi disliked: “At the end of the day.” As I frequently do, I went to the Internet to see what others have to say about it. I laughed out loud when I found this comment on the Urban Dictionary: “at the end of the day - Rubbish phrase used by many annoying people.” Jessi would agree with that!
Someone wrote in a blog: “‘At the end of the day’ is something that you say before you give the most important fact of a situation: ‘Of course, I’ll listen to what she has to say but at the end of the day, it’s my decision.’”
And then I found a figurative definition on an online dictionary that said: “when everything else has been taken into consideration. At the end of the day you will have to decide where you want to live. The committee interviewed many applicants for the post, but at the end of the day made no appointment.”
There’s a line in a song from “Les Miserables” that says: “At the end of the day you’re another day older, And that’s all you can say for the life of the poor.”
In that sentence, the phrase is not really a cliche, is it? It actually has meaning.
Maybe it would be good if we tried to avoid the cliches that are so prevalent, and instead pack as much meaning into our sentences as we can. But that’s just my two cents’ worth!
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