In a recent conversation with yet another incredulous person about how I don’t watch television (said person trying to sell me cable TV over the phone), I referred to the DVD player as The Gadget Hooked to the TV That Plays Movies (or something equally odd). My daughter rolled her eyes and said how it made me sound old.
Maybe it was a senior moment. Hey, they can happen to anyone.
Or it was one of those curious turns my mind sometimes takes to avoid a perceived cliché. (If everyone says that, it must be cliché. Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!) This leads to me sounding a bit like Mr. Pratchett’s character Leonard of Quirm on occasion, who famously named his submarine “The Going Under the Water Safely Device” and something similar to Scrabble “The Make Words with Letters That Have All Been Mixed Up Game.” (See Jingo. On second thought, read Jingo! Advice from your local Evangelical Pratchettian. You’re welcome.)
Where was I? Oh, right, mind avoiding anything that may resemble a cliché. This has happened to me for years. I suppose the blame lies in the writing workshops I took years ago. They beat the word “that” out of my prose and set some kind of alarm system for those nasty common phrases.
[Side trip to the thesaurus. Cliché: n. platitude, truism, saw, maxim, stereotype, Inf. bromide, prosaism, banality, commonplace, old story, old song, familiar tune, old saw, chestnut. wOOt! I came up with one not on the list. What does your thesaurus say? I have The Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale.]
Clichés do pop up in my conversations, of course, but the alarm goes off in my head when it happens, followed by an immediate desire to edit what I said. Weird writer chick, that's me.
{Today's blog title from "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" by Paul Simon}
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