At the end of the day, clichés are a useful linguistics tool, say researchers
They may be mocked for being overused, causing eye rolls whenever someone ‘runs them up the flagpole’ at work, but it turns out clichés can be a useful and creative linguistic tool of expression.
Following two years of research, university linguists have discovered that the humble stock phrase is actually used in many, varied and highly creative ways by speakers to signal their identity, their agreement and their group belonging.
Dr Derek Bousfield, Head of Department in Languages, Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University, and co-author of Talking in Clichés: The Use of Stock Phrases in Discourse and Communication, said: “We can’t escape clichés.
“It’s obvious through internet memes and popular ‘cliché bingo’ games that within every sector, business, and organisation, there are similar and recognisably specific ways of speaking which include clichés as linguistic resources.
“We use them - perhaps more gleefully than many would like to admit - precisely because they are shared resources, known touchpoints, and phrases with largely stable meanings. Clichés mean the same thing to speaker and hearer time in, time out. In short, they are efficient.”
As part of the two-year research project, Dr Bousfield and his co-researcher Dr Stella Bullo analysed clichés in a suite of corporate documents, including 250 mission statements gathered from companies listed on the London Stock Exchange’s 1,000 Companies to Inspire Britain 2019 report.
A total of 442 clichés were found across the texts, with the most frequent being ‘at the heart of’, ‘pride ourselves on’ and ‘everything we do’. Engineering and construction was the industry revealed to use clichés most frequently, with financial services and healthcare technology close behind.
The project also analysed linguistic behaviours in meetings and email communications within a corporate environment, with amongst the most frequent clichés found to be ‘moving forward’, ‘hitting a brick wall’ and ‘back to square one’.
The use of clichés in episodes of reality TV show The Apprentice was also analysed, with 152 of the contestants’ spoken stock phrases collected and scrutinised. This included one contestant vowing to ‘make Lord Sugar an offer he cannot refuse’, found to (albeit humorously) evoke mafia-esque levels of power, as well as clichés ‘pick off the competition one by one’ and ‘pull out the big guns’, both weapons metaphors chosen by contestants to make them seem confrontational in environments where competitiveness was seen to be prized.
Far from being hackneyed and lazy, these and other commonplace clichés were found by the researchers to have highly creative effects.
Dr Bousfield said: “Moving on from the concept of clichés as formulaic and lacking in thought or originality, they have a role to play in creating a sense of community and signalling the genre of communication.
“Overall, our research indicates that clichés are highly effective in conveying a speaker’s particular view of reality, and can be very useful in managing relationships and expressing identity.”
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Talking in Clichés: The Use of Stock Phrases in Discourse and Communication by Dr Derek Bousfield and Dr Stella Bullo is published by Cambridge University press.
