THE MEETING HALL – As usual, our chairman, Bottom Line, called the group to order as quick as a New York minute. “Fellow members, welcome to another meeting of Club Cliché, where the thread-bare gather to trot out all those shop-worn shibboleths, overused words and terms that were once fresh and cute but today are over-the-hill, dead as a doornail and their shelf life has expired. I see some old friends out there like Occupy Wall Street and your cousin, Wall Street to Main Street. Hi, to you, Man Up and Shovel Ready. Same for Sit Around Singing Kumbaya. I guess you are still is use, like Gravitas, Low Hanging Fruit and On the Wrong Side of History. I see Spot On and Shelf Life are still around. To all of you, I have a real surprise this time, which I shall save for later.”
Boots on the Ground spoke up. “Some of my war-time buddies are here which I’d like to introduce. There is R&R and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder better known as PTSD, which took over from Battle Fatigue and Shell Shocked. We have WMDs, which don’t exist, also Radicalized and Embolden Our Enemies.” Bottom Line nodded in approval. “I think they have more than earned their membership. Yes, you there. You have a question?”
Millennial asked: “What’s a shibboleth?”
Bottom Line answered: “You are. The word has gone through many changes over the years, but today it means jargon, inside baseball or well-worn passwords. Millennial I think qualifies. Moving on, Give a Shout Out wants to gives a shout out. To whom?
Shout Out stood up and shouted out: “WHERE’S YOU GO, GIRL?”
“Alas, You Go Girl is no longer with us, which brings us to that sad part of the meeting:
Those who have been dropped from our membership due to lack of overuse. Sorry, Boooring, you were so overused, but not anymore. Same for Wazzup? During the ebola scare, every TV news story had to get in Protocol, but ebola is not hot anymore and neither is Protocol.
“It’s not fair to kick out terms that have been beaten to death on TV,” said Breaking News. “That’s especially true for our sportscasters. Take, for example, pro hoops, the ‘Boys and ‘Stros. Not to mention the Pinstripes, frozen rope, walk-off and pick six. Don’t forget FloMoJo and basketball shots from Downtown. Our jock-talkers wouldn’t have a show without boring and repetitious clichés. We can’t even call the Super Bowl that anymore. The NFL copyrighted the name and sues anyone who uses it. Now it’s The Big Game.”
Bad Boy, Selfie and You Need a Bigger Boat applauded.
“I’ve been wondering,” asked Metrics, “what, exactly does cliché mean?”
Bottom Line explained: “It’s from the French ‘clic-chez,’ pronounced klee-SHAY, meaning ‘expressions used by the rhetorically challenged.’ Now I see Dumb Down wishes to speak.”
Dumb Down stood up. “No one uses clichés more than our politicians. I’m going to miss John Boehner, he used them constantly, like Whack-a-Mole, Adult Conversation and Nuclear Option. But we still have Gridlock and Skin in the Game. Politicians used to receive opposition, but now it’s Pushback.” Bricks & Mortar raised its hand. “I still miss Come Out of the Shadows and Corporations Are People, Too.”
Get a Life and its cousin, Get a Room, waved for attention. “That brings us to our current political deadly tattered phrases, like Make America Great Again, Nasty Women, Income Gap and Fly-Over America, which make us grit our teeth every time we hear them.” Bottom Line took over again. “This campaign has also given new life to the hated press. Drive-by Media is back. So is Liberal Press and Newt Gingrich’s favorite term, the Elite Media, which he manages to work into every sentence. Then we have the Lame Stream Media. It always gets a laugh. As for the surprise I mentioned, a big cliché welcome to Post-truth, which has been named Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 international word of the year, wining out over a field that included Adulting, Alt-right and Brixiteer. It also beat out Coulrophobia which is an extreme or irrational fear of clowns. That term surged after that rash of reports of scary clowns.”
Multitask had a question. “Wonder whatever happened to that scary clown fad? I guess they all piled into a VW Beatle and drove off.”
Bottom Line continued. “The use of Post-truth is defined as – hang on — ‘relating to things in which objective facts mean less than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ In other words, don’t let the truth or the facts get in the way of what you want to believe. Oxford found a 2,000 percent growth of Post-truth over last year, and – to no one’s surprise — much of this usage can be traced directly to Donald Trump supporters. They simply ignore his statements, such as he knows more about ISIS than the generals, or that unemployment is up – it’s down considerably from when Obama took office – or that he can’t release his taxes until his audit is complete – the IRS said he could release them anytime. He also said, ‘I will never settle the Trump University suit out of court.’ He did, and paid $25 million. There are more of Trump’s Post-truths, but you get the idea.”
“What’s the difference between a Post-truth and Truthiness?” asked Mojo.
“A good question,” said our leader. “Truthiness was coined by Stephen Colbert 10 years ago, and was so popular that Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society each chose Truthiness as its word of the year. Truthiness is a humorous way of discussing a truth or fact that is not exactly a lie, just borderline or slightly slanted. But Post-truth goes a step further, and turns outright lies into believable thoughts. Hey, some 61 million voters suspended their brains and bought Trump’s Post-truths.”
“What’s the takeaway from this?” asked Takeaway.
“The same as always,” said Bottom Line. “Avoid clichés like the plague.”
Ashby is a cliche at ashby2@comcast.net
