Here's a smorgasbord of cliches in word and deed-
A recent competition in The Telegraph asked contestants to "compose a piece of prose crammed with as many infuriating phrases as possible." The winning examples don't contain insults about mothers chewing cigars or sitting around the house. Mostly, they riff on the homogenized, sporty corporate lingo that saturates speech and e-mails with extra syllables while leaching them of meaning.
An eminently modern couple in New Zealand is fighting for a phrase seen most often in rap lyrics or text messages in order to name their son 4Real Wheaton. According to them, this name reflects their deepest feelings about the awestruck wonder of parenthood. Apparently, the spelled-out, concatenated phrase Forreal as a first name is vastly inferior. I would be surprised if any major database or official record system is designed to store digits anywhere in the first or last name fields. But how weak-spined it would be to let disruptions with identification for niggly things like school, medical records, credit or benefits stop one from reaching new heights of nomenclature by imposing today's catchphrase on one's own child. 4Life.
Last, here's a set of forty hackeneyed cliches that are claimed to exist only in the movies. Some are purely visual, but some are practically mold-covered plot devices I still find in newly published books. Are you guilty of using any?...Me? Oh, never. Probably never...Okay, not since last week, but I took the pledge and I'm 7 days clean. I'm worried how I'll fare once I actually start writing again though. I'm sure it'll be harder to keep the high road then.
P.S. I think we've got the house.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Hoist Upon My Own Tired Cliches
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9 comments:
I love cliches, and self-awareness of them. I wrote about some of the differences in movies and real life a while back here...
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=14741761&postID=3132781714107406860
and concluded that real life isn't as much fun because cliches don't work. Here's a sample:
Cars Exploding - I've mentioned this one before, but cars explode on every single cop and detective show on TV. Every week, a dozen cars go up in a giant fireball. I've never seen one, not even once. I feel like I've been gypped.
Overturning A Table - Here's another one. I've been waiting for somebody to get in an argument and flip a table ever since I saw Duran Duran's "Rio" video. Doesn't happen in real life, at least not on purpose.
Paternity Tests - I've never known anybody who needed one except Anna Nicole Smith, but there's one a month on soap operas. And also, every paternity test is wrong. Every single one is compromised. No soap opera fan was surprised when OJ was acquitted, because they're used to things always being wrong.
Loved the blog!
Sorry about that, I posted the wrong link.
http://www.reidaboutit.com/2007/04/tv-vs-real-life.html
Thanks!
Thanks for coming by. I liked your post on TV cliches, but especially the vasectomy one. How else would I learn?
Re: abrupt phone calls. Of course, all the screenwriting books tell you not to wa$te valuable screen time on words that don't move the story, so Hello and Goodbye go out the window unless someone can really EMOTE! Better than life and twice as natural.
But that overturning tables thing is right on. I've never seen it happen in life- maybe because the angry eaters still pay for the food?- yet I can recall seeing it tens of times on film.
I've never turned over a table on purpose. The times it did happen, it wasn't really for dramatic effect. Whatever salient point I was trying to convey lay splattered on the floor, covered with the pasta of dispair.
Don't try these metaphors at home, kids. I am a professional.
Okay, so I overturned a table once and everyone is still talking about it. But I needed the distraction so I could make my getaway, but then the car exploded and I was late for my vasectomy, but the doc said the problem wasn't that I was too late, the vasectomy was too late. The results of the paternity test will be announced on Good Morning America next week. Stay tuned.
Terrie
We may have found a winner.
cliches? what are you talking about?
"If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises wearing their most revealing underwear."
I do this all the time. Am I not supposed to?
I've seen two auto-fireballs on the NY Thruway. And the wind knocked a table into my legs at the farmer's market on Tuesday. But you stumped me on the paternity test.
Here's a cliche story entry I made on CrimeSpace's Cliche Challenge:
I wouldn’t send a dog out on a night like this, I thought to myself when the dish with red hair waltzed into my office.
“Sid, you gotta help me,” she sobbed. “Frank’s done me a bad turn with that funny money. Cops think they got the dirt on me now for sure.”
“No worries, babe. All we gotta do is give that poor excuse for a man a dose of his own medicine.”
She gasped. “You mean Johnny’s kid-glove treatment? That old con? He’ll never fall for that.”
“Ya gotta believe in yourself,” I told her. “Be your own master, doll.”
“You’re the boss, big spender.”
We were finally seeing eye to eye. But I doubted I’d find her check in the mail. No good deed goes unpunished.
Alternatefish, that's a good one.
Lois, in the movie does Robert Mitchum play Sid?
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