Cliché Day

History

The origin of this observance is not well documented. No founding organization, proclamation, or first observance can be sourced for Cliché Day, and nothing reputable explains why it sits on November 3.

The word's history is firmer. "Cliché" is French, and Merriam-Webster glosses it literally as "printer's stereotype," from the past participle of clicher, to stereotype, a verb it describes as of imitative origin — the sound of metal striking a mold. Its children's dictionary puts it more bluntly: French for "metal printing plate." A cliché was a cast plate that let a printer run the same block of type again and again without resetting a single letter.

"Stereotype" is the same object under a Greek name. Merriam-Webster takes it from French stéréotype, from stéré- plus type, and records the noun in English from 1799 and the verb from 1804. The dictionary notes that the two words "were originally printers' terms" whose "original meanings are essentially synonymous, referring to printing blocks from which numerous prints could be made," and adds that cliché is simply the French word for stereotype. From there they drifted apart: cliché toward the worn-out phrase, stereotype toward the unfair belief about a group of people. Both insults keep the original machinery inside them, because the complaint in each case is the same — something was cast once and is now being reproduced without thought.

The figurative English sense arrived later than you might guess. Merriam-Webster's first known use of cliché in English, in the sense of a trite phrase, is 1881 — more than eighty years after stereotype.

The best argument for why any of this matters is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," published in the magazine Horizon in April 1946. Orwell's objection is not that clichés are ugly. He distinguishes a newly invented metaphor, which "assists thought by evoking a visual image," from one technically dead, which "has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word," and saves his contempt for the middle category: "a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves." Ready-made phrases, he argues, spare you the work of thinking and even of hearing your own sentences — "you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences" — which is why he treats stale language as a moral problem rather than a stylistic one. "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

How to observe

Read the Orwell essay. It is short, the Orwell Foundation hosts it in full with the estate's permission, and it remains the clearest account of what a cliché actually costs the person using it.

Then try his closing rules on a paragraph of your own writing: avoid any figure of speech you are used to seeing in print, prefer the short word to the long one, cut whatever can be cut, prefer the active voice, and reach for the everyday English equivalent before the foreign or technical term — while keeping his last rule in view, which permits breaking any of the others rather than writing something outright barbarous.

For the printing half of the word, a letterpress studio or a print museum will usually show you a real stereotype plate. Holding one stops the metaphor being a metaphor: a solid slab of cast metal, impossible to adjust, good for one thing repeated indefinitely.