Welcome to the Golden Age of Clichés
A few weeks ago, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, sent an email to the newsroom about clichés. To paraphrase: He wanted us to try harder to avoid them, because nobody comes to the website or the print magazine to be bored and annoyed.
Did I think that this email was directed at me, personally, and that it referred to the unacceptable number of clichés in writing? Well, he included a long list of specific words and phrases to avoid, and several of them looked … . Needless to say, nonsense filler phrases such as are bound to slip into even not-lazy writing. Clichés aren’t necessarily inherently bad turns of phrase—in fact, they’re generally good, and that’s how they become clichés. The first person to say “in the wake of” should have been proud of themselves. It was an
