Mea Culpa: the double helix and the life cycle of the cliché

Hackneyed phrases, either of three and hyphen havoc in this week’s Independent 

John Rentoul
Friday 13 April 2018 12:42 BST
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Deoxyribonucleic acid: a cliché that is dying out, thank goodness
Deoxyribonucleic acid: a cliché that is dying out, thank goodness

I have a theory about clichés, which is that they break out, peak and decline, like an infection. Then comes the interesting bit, when they can follow one of two paths: either they die out gradually, or they become assimilated into the language. These survivors simply become figures of speech and over time people forget where they came from.

“A week is a long time in politics” is a phrase of fake wisdom so detached from its origins in one of Harold Wilson’s crises in the 1960s that no one could remember, even when it first started to appear in print, to what it referred. Similarly, the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid”, is still wheeled out to explain anything in politics, or is adapted by headline writers – “It’s the vegan shoes, stupid” – to cover any subject under the sun. It is annoying because it is wrong: the original reminder on the whiteboard in the war room of the 1992 Clinton campaign was just “the economy, stupid”.

There is little that can be done about these durable clichés, except to avoid them in one’s own writing, recalling George Orwell’s injunction: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

But the other kind of cliché, the ones that are dying out, can and should be hastened on their way towards extinction. One that we used a couple of times in the past week is “in the DNA”, to mean a basic and ineradicable quality. In an article about football in Kosovo we said that the story of the life and death of Adam Jashari, leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army and a supporter of a team called FK Drenica, was “so etched now in the DNA of this young country”.

And in a completely different kind of article, our “16 best vegan shoes for women”, we said: “It will be in a brand’s DNA to encourage customers to shop more consciously...” Enough. No more. It is our Orwellian duty – using Orwellian in its proper sense – to help stamp out this infection altogether.

Either or threether: Our editorial on the 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force last week concluded by saying: “It must continue to be properly funded and resourced – but it must not be a vehicle either for militarism, grandstanding or Brexiteering.” As Philip Nalpanis pointed out, “either” usually implies two options.

The Oxford Dictionary helpfully says that it is “used before the first of two (or occasionally more) given alternatives”. As ever, then, it is not wrong to use it for a list of three, but if it jars with some readers it is better avoided – especially in this case where nothing is lost by simply deleting it.

Have you red this? I must say I hadn’t noticed it, but several readers, most recently Jeremy Lawford and Robert Curtis, have written to say that we sometimes write “lead” when we mean “led”. They noticed a report, since corrected, which said the weather the previous day “lead to traffic disruption”. English spelling, eh? It would be easier if we wrote about books we have red.

I thought, however, that we should at least have been awarded bonus points for avoiding the nearly compulsory cliché, “travel chaos”.

Hyphen-friendly: Recently we wrote about the National Rifle Association in the US: “The Political Victory Fund contributes money to gun rights-friendly candidates that the NRA has endorsed.” As John Harrison wrote, that seems wrong. He is right, and we changed it to “gun-rights friendly”.

The difficulty arises because we would hyphenate it differently if “gun rights” were a single word. If, for example, we wrote about an organisation that gave money to environment-friendly candidates, the hyphen would be before “friendly”. But if we wrote “gun-rights-friendly” that would be too hyphen-heavy, and isn’t needed to make the meaning clear.

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