Oct 20, 2009

Tongues, cheeks, clichés

You know what I really hate? Damn, I hate it so much I don't even want to type it, because that means I'll have to see it for the rest of the time that this window is open. But I'm strong.

It's this expression "tongue planted firmly in cheek." This is, I can only assume, meant to be a cute original way to avoid using fellow cliché "tongue in cheek." Okay, but guess what. It's not cute, and it's not original. It's ugly, it's stupid, it's so overused that it has pretty much overrun the original phrase, and it HURTS MY SOUL! It's like "why use three perfectly good words with a designated meaning when we could use five idiotic cutesy-poo words to say the same thing but make Erin cry?"

4 comments:

LaDeeDa said...

Travesties like this happen, in my opinion, when writers are too lazy to spend time with a good thesaurus. When tempted to take the easy (thoughtless) way out, one should slow down, breathe deeply, and brew a lovely pot of tea.

Hayley said...

How do you feel about "in no uncertain terms"?

E said...

That's certainly another member of this class of phrases. Do you think these are a result of those high school papers with the word counts that we had meet by making every word into as many words as possible? It gives me great satisfaction to know that English teachers actually *are* the cause of a large chunk of awful writing habits.

Anyway, "in no uncertain terms" is one I'd probably avoid, but it doesn't make me want to throw things at the writer. I've always been especially squeamish about expressions that involve body parts.

Hayley said...

Gotta agree on the body parts thing, hands down.