Photo Courtesy: Poynter

Nirjala Adhikari

Sometimes I find the word “word” itself more interesting than anything else. I don’t just like its syntactic form, but the connotation of it as well. Today, I’m going to talk about the word “cliché”. It may be a beautiful word for many other people, but I think of it quite negatively and I don’t know why.

The word has been haunting me for many days. I recently asked one of my closest friends, “What is your opinion of the word ‘cliché’?” And his reaction was quite neutral even though I asked him a random question out of the blue.  “In which sense?”, he asked. 

I replied saying, “Just in general”. He asked me what I meant again and that itself was a cliché. The dictionary defines it as a stereotypical opinion or phrase but in a larger view, we can see it in our thought process, a system of governance and also in bureaucracy. I think we all are products of clichés because we hardly raise questions over the existing thought processes, cultures and discourses. We accept stereotypical and overrated opinions on beauty and unquestioned phrases, for example, boys are boys, brave as a lion, every storm has a silver lining, everything is fair in love and war and so on. However, the world could be more democratic and equal if we crossed the so-called boundaries of clichés.

When I was interested in clichés, I found a beautiful quote on it saying, “The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather they are the superficial articulation of very good ones”. My take on cliché is not different from that. If we deny the depth of things and accept the superficial aspect of it, then it is a cliché. We can see clichés everywhere like in dining halls, parliament, local markets, shopping malls, wallpapers and newsrooms. I consider myself a clichéd form of everything.

Though I’m talking about clichés, I am unfairly forgetting about “Samuel Beckett”. When I think about him, I think about his characters. The funniest thing is that when I think about his characters, I take life as a cliché. Life is indeed a cliché. I tried to redefine it but I couldn't. I always say it’s better to be unsung than to be a cliché.