The Lake Today

I was speaking with someone this past week, who shall remain nameless, but who spoke in clichés and that conservation reminded me of great aunt of mine who also had the habit of speaking in clichés.

I remember her as a spinster in her 80s who didn’t really relate to children, nevertheless whenever the family visited would always try to have a conservation with us kids and those talks were so filled with “old sayings” that for the most part left us totally baffled as to what she was actually trying to convey.

For instance, one phrase she frequently used when describing someone’s behavior was to say the person was “as calm as a hog on ice.”

To this day, I’m not sure exactly what that meant. Since swine have cloven feet and have a very difficult time walking on any slippery surface, was that supposed to mean the person was extremely nervous or that they remained calm in the most difficult of circumstances?

In thinking about my aunt’s habit of speaking in clichés, I decided to Google the word cliché and see if I could find some explanation as to what certain phrases we are all familiar were actually supposed to mean.

Well, I didn’t find any set definition for any one specific cliché, but I did find a great website that listed, in alphabetical order, thousands of the “old sayings” that have become an accepted part of the American vernacular.

There were clichés that are accepted simply because they have been used for centuries and others that are relatively new but are an accepted way of speaking by all of us, regardless of age, even though they started out as a slang term invented by a younger generation.

For instance, a couple of clichés that are leftover from earlier times, but are still used today are “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” or “always keep your powder dry.”

And a couple that were started by the younger generations during our more recent past, but that have now become an accepted part of everyone’s language would be “you snooze, you lose” and “sensory overload.”

There are also those cliqued phrases that had their beginnings in literature or as a quote from a famous person such as “silence is golden” and “slippery slope.”

And ones that fit our modern way of life, but that would have baffled our forefathers such as “off the shelf” and “on a wing and a prayer.”

There are cliques that need no explanation and are very specific in meaning such as

“eat like a horse,” “what you see is what you get” or “all bent out of shape.”

But my favorites are the cliques that simply make no sense at all and can be used by the speaker to convey almost anything they desire.

Such as “knee-high to a grasshopper,”every dog has his day” or “even a dumb squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.”

So now that I have taken this rather lengthy stroll through the world of clichés and am running out of print space, I’ll “sign off” and “call it a day.”