文本化学

Since the dawn of time, English teachers have instructed students to avoid cliché. Clichés kill the imagination; they arrest thought; Hannah Arendt blamed them, in part, for the Holocaust. Once a phrase has been stamped with the stigma of cliché, the thinking goes, it is no longer avail- able to either the creative writer or the close reader. Writers on the verge of cliché should quickly swerve before getting caught in its thought-quashing machine, and readers who come across it should write it off as canned, shopworn, and tired. And yet, what, as a metaphor, could be more canned than “canned,” more shopworn than “shopworn,” more tired than “tired”? …