Hip Deep In Clichés,We Push Onward   

Where it will all end, nobody knows.

Looking weary and haggard, an American icon who had lost his moral compass was finally facing his defining moment in court that day. The Dream Team had hit the ground running, and now it was cautiously optimistic that it had come from ground zero to capture the hearts and minds of the jurors, despite the chilling effects of testimony that had pushed the envelope in trying to ratchet up a weak case.

At least the trial by fire was over now. All the navel-gazing in the jury box had given way to a giant sucking sound: positive evidence of a sea change. The verdict would be a wake-up call. The legal media darlings would go home and it would be up to the court of public opinion.

But hark. This just in. It's official: He's not guilty.

AJR's Cliché Corner, a neat little monthly feature from which most of the above narrative has been spliced, observes its fifth anniversary with this issue. Kudos to the Corner, we might say, if we wanted to coin a kudo. Way to go, Corner. You're an island of semantic virtue in a sea of troubled syntax, a veritable storehouse of hot-button verbal foibles and a living testimonial to the fabled frailty of human nature, if we may wax clichéic.

Suzan Revah of the AJR staff is maestro of the Corner, which was founded by Chip Rowe, Revah's predecessor. Suzan watches like a hawk (a dove? an eagle..?) for clichés. She has help from other cliché spotters on the staff.

"What happens is we first have an exchange of ideas and then we go to a Nexis search to see how many times a presumed cliché has been used," Suzan said in a special interview for this staunch anti-cliché column (firmly anti-? assertively anti-..?) "If we find it is a valid cliché we go with it."

Some clichés are very topical – for instance, that giant sucking sound when Ross Perot was talking about the deficit and impressionable reporters began to think they were hearing the GSS everywhere, or "train wreck," a major cliché appearing in all kinds of stories after Washington reporters repeatedly warned that the Clinton-Congress conflict over adoption of a budget might produce a giant TW.

Suzan feels pretty sure that Mecca, with or without the cap "M" and without reference to the city itself, has been the most commonly used cliché of recent times (see page 12).

The first time she searched for it on Nexis "it wouldn't even count them, there were so many," she said. When she excluded references to the city she still found more than 700 Mecca/mecca sightings during the previous month. "Everything is the Mecca of something," she said.

In personal references, Suzan suspects that the most imprinted people in recent years have been "fugitive financier Robert Vesco" and "spinmeister David Gergen."

Why so many clichés? "My theory is that it's just plain old laziness," Suzan said. Then she said something that had a chilling effect. "Sometimes I'm inspired by something that appears in AJR's copy."

You mean raw copy, not in print. "Sometimes in print," she said. My mind reeled. Surely not, I shuddered. It was a defining moment.