Good writing avoids clichés, not idiomatic expressions

[Joe Carillo]

A Filipina who works in the Middle East e-mailed me last July 21 to call attention to her comments to old postings of mine in my English-usage blogspot, Jose Carillo on the English Language. “I’ve been reading your earlier posts, some of which I have commented on,” Lucky Mae wrote. “You haven’t answered them though, so I thought that either I didn’t state them properly or you think I should just figure them out myself. It’s most likely, though, that you didn’t get to read them…”

As it turns out, Lucky Mae posted her comments only this July to three of my weekly postings that date as far back as July of 2009 and February this year. No wonder then that I wasn’t able to read her comments. I keep track of replies to my blog postings only up to three to four weeks after they are published, after which I consider them closed for discussion.

(So for those who visit and read my old postings in that blogspot, please take note: When you post a comment to a posting of mine that’s more than a month old, please send me a copy of your comment by e-mail to j8carillo@yahoo.com. Once you alert me about your belated comment, I’ll see to it that you get a reply both in my blogspot and also by e-mail.)   

On clichés and idiomatic expressions 

Anyway, one of Lucky Mae’s comments was about my blog on September 5, 2009, “The misguided journalistic practice of fiddling with idioms.” In that blog, I discussed the practice of some newspaper reporters of fiddling with idiomatic expressions to put color to their stories, in the process coming up with awful mixed metaphors like “people from all walks of life will paint the town yellow” and “to fall prey to glib tongues when all kinds of scams rear their ugly heads.” I pointed out that it really isn’t a linguistic crime to fashion a sentence with the use of idiomatic expressions; after all, I said, idioms are handy, off-the-shelf rhetorical devices that quickly drive home a point. But I said that to use two or more of them in the same clause or sentence constitutes bad writing.

To that blog of mine, Lucky Mae commented: “I’m not sure if it was from your first book, English Plain and Simple, that I learned to refrain from adding idioms in a composition. That better yet, for the writer to appear more emphatic, he or she should form a new idiomatic expression altogether.”

I am constrained to make this open rejoinder to correct this seriously mistaken notion about idioms that Lucky Mae supposes to have gotten from my book. Definitely, English Plain and Simple doesn’t advise writers to refrain from using idioms in their compositions, so that idea of hers must have come from elsewhere. Instead, what my book suggests is for writers to refrain from using clichés, not idioms and idiomatic expressions.

There’s a big difference between them. An idiom is the language peculiar to a people in a certain locality or to members of a particular group or occupation—it’s the way they normally speak to one another and get themselves understood. And an idiomatic expression is an expression whose meaning usually can’t be inferred from the meanings of the words that make it up; even so, that expression is commonly used and clearly understood by a particular community or group.

In contrast, clichés are those commonplace, overused expressions that once might have been fresh and original, probably even written by a good writer sometime in the past. However, these expressions have been used so excessively over the years that they have become very unpleasant to hear, like “dead as a doorknob,” “smell like a rat,” and “stink like a dead mackerel.” And the problem, I emphasize in English Plain and Simple, is that “many of us drug our English insensible with an overdose of clichés.”

So, as I wrote in my column today (July 24, 2010) in The Manila Times in reply to Lucky Mae’s comment on clichés, our fight shouldn’t really be against idioms and idiomatic expressions but against clichés and, I might as well add, against mixed metaphors as well. For idioms and idiomatic expressions are essentially metaphors or short-hand language for shared knowledge or experience between the speaker or writer and the audience. They are not something we need to craft ourselves each time for emphasis. They are already embedded in the language, and to set out not to use them altogether is to make ourselves sound like strangers to the language.

To get to know more of my thoughts about clichés, idioms, and idiomatic expressions, click the following links to the following four essays of mine:

The reign of the dreadful clichés

Learning the English idioms

The nature of true idioms

Clichés and bad body English

On transitive and intransitive verbs

On a blogspot posting of mine on July 18, 2009, “Dealing with Various Levels of Intransitivity,” in which I discussed the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, Lucky Mae made the following comment: “I was taught of only one foolproof way on this subject in grade school: words ending in “-ly” set intransitive verbs apart.”

I’m positive that either Lucky Mae’s teacher mistook intransitive verbs for adverbs in teaching these parts of speech (in which case a lot of pupils in that class must have also absorbed that wrong notion and carried it in their heads for God knows how long until someone corrected it for them), or Lucky Mae simply misunderstood what her teacher taught in class and have had that wrong notion ever since. For definitely, that idea is flat-out wrong. The “-ly” word ending couldn’t be a foolproof way to distinguish intransitive verbs from transitive verbs; in fact, “-ly” is not a characteristic ending of verbs but of adverbs (“tenderly,” “rapidly,” “slowly,” “precariously,” “passively”) and, in much fewer cases, also of adjectives (“priestly,” “miserly,” “portly”).       

It’s most likely then that Lucky Mae’s teacher meant to say something like this general statement instead: “One foolproof way to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb is that an adverb ends in ‘-ly.’” Even this statement, however, is also flat-out wrong; it’s a seriously misplaced and misapplied generalization. The truth of the matter is that in English, definitely not all adverbs end in “-ly” (“always,” “everywhere,” and “rather,” for instance, are adverbs), and that some adjectives—not very many, though—also end in “-ly” (as in the case of the three examples I have given above: “priestly,” “miserly,” “portly”). In other words, the “-ly” ending is not the exclusive domain of adverbs and, truth to tell, verbs—whether transitive or intransitive—should hardly figure in that grammatical comparison at all. There’s simply no connection.

On the growing noun-to-verb conversion syndrome

Finally, on a blogspot posting of mine on February 2, 2010, “Not just a curiosity piece but a little primer in verb-formation,” where I discussed the growing noun-to-verb conversion syndrome in our own time, Lucky Mae made the following comment: “But leaving to the writer/speaker the prerogative to choose the appropriate nerbs is likewise tricky. Can’t we just accept where the English language is going and tolerate it? For only a hard-and-fast rule can put a stop to this...”

All I can say about Lucky Mae’s comment is this: We can’t control or legislate the path that a language will take over time. The best we can do is only to encourage responsible use of the language, whether it’s English or another language. As I said in my December 5, 2005 essay on nerbing, “It is highly unlikely that the nerbing syndrome can be stopped…but we can at least help prevent inappropriate nerbs from swamping English by using usefulness and aesthetics as criteria for evaluating nerbs before using them ourselves. This way, only those that foster brevity as well as accuracy and clarity to language can survive and become welcome entries to the English lexicon.”