Cliche

Have you ever noticed that the most tired phrases sound freshest the first time you hear them? A cliché begins its life as poetry. It ends as a fossil.

Most people assume "cliché" just means a worn-out saying -- something so overused it lost all meaning. They think it's been around forever, baked into English for centuries.

Not quite. The word cliché is French, born in the printing trade around 1825. It comes from the French word *clicher*, meaning to stereotype or to make a printing plate. In Parisian printshops, a *cliché* was a metal plate engraved with a frequently used image or block of text. Once you cast that plate, you could reproduce it infinitely, identically, thoughtlessly. The printer didn't have to think. The plate was reusable, mass-produced, and ultimately -- soulless. By the 1830s, French writers borrowed the term to describe language that had become like those metal plates: stamped out, repeated, dead on arrival.

It's a perfect metaphor that became ironic. We use the word "cliché" -- itself describing something worn out from overuse -- to describe... things worn out from overuse. The word contains its own meaning.

Today when you groan at someone using "at the end of the day" or "it is what it is," you're watching that printing press in action. Fresh thought gets cast into metal. Then we stamp it out a million times until nobody remembers why it ever mattered.

Cliche is your word of the day. This is The Why of Words.