Answer: How is the word "cliché" used?
daegaer asked, "How is the word 'cliché' used?"
With examples from Highlander: The Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation
In my experience, most often by this guy in too many of my Lit classes when he wanted to express disdain, which was most of the time. “Cliché” was second only to “banal” and edged in just ahead of “pretentious.”
Oh, not what you meant? Sorry.
Cliché as a noun is pretty straightforward, and as far as I know, there is no dispute about its usage. The preferred spelling keeps the accent mark from the original French; however, largely because newspapers do not use accent marks, cliche has become accepted as an alternate spelling. (For those of you who do your own HTML, the tag for the accented "e" is & eacute ; with no spaces.)
In a comment, my fellow Grammarian amedia provided this example of cliché being used as a noun. I liked it so well I had to share.
"Oh, so you're going to tie me up and tell me your plans before leaving me to be killed by some devilishly clever device of your own invention." Methos yawned. "What a cliché."
Where we have seen a usage shift is in the use of cliché as an adjective. The adjective form of cliché, which dates from 1928, is clichéd.
"Really, Picard," Q said with an exaggerated grimace, "I should enjoy our conversations more if you could bring yourself to leave out the lectures on your quaint, clichéd human morality."
Enough people have begun to use cliché as an adjective, though, that it has made its way into Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. That said, cliché as an adjective is not yet universally accepted; the American Heritage and both of the British English dictionaries I consulted (the Compact OED and the Cambridge Online) list clichéd as the only adjective form. Perhaps it’s just the prescriptivist in me, but I don’t see cliché as an adjective contributing to character voice in the way many words we discuss here do. On this one I recommend using clichéd - at least for now.
Bonus lecture
While I was researching this answer, I came across the etymology of cliché and thought it was too interesting to not share. Cliché developed as a printer’s term for a stereotype, which was also originally a French printing term. Stereotype meant a method of printing from a solid plate of type, and came to mean the plate itself. Cliché was an onomatopoeic term that described the sound of the stereotype plate being cast. Each term eventually made its way into common parlance as a figurative extension of the original, literal meaning. That’s so nifty!
Sources:
Merriam-Webster Online
Online Etymology Dictionary
American Heritage Dictionary
Compact Oxford English Dictionary
Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary Online
With examples from Highlander: The Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation
In my experience, most often by this guy in too many of my Lit classes when he wanted to express disdain, which was most of the time. “Cliché” was second only to “banal” and edged in just ahead of “pretentious.”
Oh, not what you meant? Sorry.
Cliché as a noun is pretty straightforward, and as far as I know, there is no dispute about its usage. The preferred spelling keeps the accent mark from the original French; however, largely because newspapers do not use accent marks, cliche has become accepted as an alternate spelling. (For those of you who do your own HTML, the tag for the accented "e" is & eacute ; with no spaces.)
In a comment, my fellow Grammarian amedia provided this example of cliché being used as a noun. I liked it so well I had to share.
"Oh, so you're going to tie me up and tell me your plans before leaving me to be killed by some devilishly clever device of your own invention." Methos yawned. "What a cliché."
Where we have seen a usage shift is in the use of cliché as an adjective. The adjective form of cliché, which dates from 1928, is clichéd.
"Really, Picard," Q said with an exaggerated grimace, "I should enjoy our conversations more if you could bring yourself to leave out the lectures on your quaint, clichéd human morality."
Enough people have begun to use cliché as an adjective, though, that it has made its way into Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. That said, cliché as an adjective is not yet universally accepted; the American Heritage and both of the British English dictionaries I consulted (the Compact OED and the Cambridge Online) list clichéd as the only adjective form. Perhaps it’s just the prescriptivist in me, but I don’t see cliché as an adjective contributing to character voice in the way many words we discuss here do. On this one I recommend using clichéd - at least for now.
Bonus lecture
While I was researching this answer, I came across the etymology of cliché and thought it was too interesting to not share. Cliché developed as a printer’s term for a stereotype, which was also originally a French printing term. Stereotype meant a method of printing from a solid plate of type, and came to mean the plate itself. Cliché was an onomatopoeic term that described the sound of the stereotype plate being cast. Each term eventually made its way into common parlance as a figurative extension of the original, literal meaning. That’s so nifty!
Sources:
Merriam-Webster Online
Online Etymology Dictionary
American Heritage Dictionary
Compact Oxford English Dictionary
Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary Online