[3-minute read]
Martin Amis wrote a fine book called The War Against Cliché. He’s mainly known as a novelist, though for too long he was just “Kingsley Amis’s bad-boy son”. That cliché, at least, had been retired decades before Sir Martin’s long and accomplished life ended in 2024. But why would a collection of his essays have been titled as an all-out attack against familiar language? I couldn’t carry his pen-case, but I’m with Amis: “To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché…”
Listen: we have the expression “it’s a cliché for a reason” for a reason. Sometimes an old saying is a useful reminder or a profound comfort; my mother never wearied of gently saying, in the face of misfortune or gloom, it’s always darkest before the dawn (Thomas Fuller, 1650) and all things work together for good (Paul’s epistle to the Romans 8:28, about a millennium and a half earlier). And yes, whoever first said, about some sport or another, that “it’s a game of inches” knew what he was talking about. It expressed an evergreen truth about the games we watch and play. Still, the best jock commentators try to avoid saying it, or give a rueful shrug of apology when they do. Because it’s OLD. It’s TIRED.
But there’s more to Amis’s war, to every good writer’s battle against cliché, than simple fatigue or a wish to seem stylish. And it applies, to a less obvious but maybe even more essential degree, to all of us. It’s this: How can we know if we’re actually thinking if we merely recycle a set of phrases that we have heard from others? The creative writer (painter, film-maker, dancer) restlessly desires to make – even though there’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9, several centuries before St. Paul) – something novel, illuminating or (at the very least) interesting. Some describe poetry as the constant renovation, the organic renewal of language. Is that process merely about the quest for a fashionable phrase, some nifty bit of in-group vocabulary?
No.
There’s a crucial and mightier argument. If we’re not actually thinking, actively seeking understanding for ourselves, then we are subject to, in no particular order, empty-headed and derivative pop culture (bingo!), a heartless and bland societal conversation (John Ralston Saul’s “unconscious civilization”), endlessly persuasive Mad Men media urging us to Buy What They’re Selling! (now!), not to mention tyrant business monopolies and their pet politicians greasing the skids for autocracy. (I apologize. “Greasing the skids” is a cliché, though perhaps you’re young enough that it feels refreshing to you as an alternative to “paving the way”.) Thinking as I was about Martin Amis et sa guerre, I ran across a 15-year-old column from The Guardian lamenting, even back then, how decisively Mr. Amis had lost his War. (It’s rather British, but a lively rant against cliché.)
All of which leads me to this morning’s encounter with an online news digest from National Public Radio, an American treasure that is under attack. (Not by me, understand.) My bride and I have been touring Ontario, but our ten days of relatively news-free travel are over. I was having an oh shit re-entry into dismay, mostly at the fate of poor suffering Venezuela. For that country to endure monstrous natural disasters, on top of the human-made kind, feels like cruel and unusual punishment. (A cliché, yes. I’ll stand by this one.) From NPR:
“The search for survivors continues nearly five days after two powerful earthquakes hit Venezuela. The official death toll is nearing 1,500, and thousands of people are still unaccounted for. Families and volunteers are tirelessly digging through collapsed buildings throughout the northern coast and in neighborhoods of Caracas, the country’s capital, in hopes of finding people alive.” (NPR’s second bit of “news we’re following”; Iran and the United States ceasing to cease fire, surprise, was number one on June 29, 2026.)
It’s awful. And just to be foolishly clear, it’s not the journalistic blandness in general that has my Cliché Alert sounding on a sunny Monday morning. Yes, “search for survivors”, “death toll” and “unaccounted for” are over-taxed phrases, but this is not poetry. Readers want to get their information efficiently, and NPR points them towards more detailed accounts if they want them. No notes, no complaint. It’s just that I have grown chronically fatigued with the adverb “tirelessly”. Obituaries of any respectable professional or half-diligent labourer are almost never without it, but it’s not just the overuse and the lack of genuine thought. It’s the lie.
Don’t start my obituary yet, but I’ll ask in advance: Please don’t use “tirelessly” to describe my life’s work as a dad, or as a midnight grader of English assignments, or as a basketball coach addicted to “the grind”. I wish we could retire the word tirelessly, and for good. (“Indefatigable” is less shopworn, but has too many syllables and is equally untrue.) I was exhausted by all of that. I still am. Life at its best, for most of us, is still tiring.
But widen the scope. As they find themselves in an epic tale of tragedy and pain and heroism, too, I am unsettled by the mere thought of that South American aftermath. Consider that legion of unhappy souls, labouring desperately to find loved ones, neighbours and strangers in a deeply shaken Venezuela!
They’re tired as hell. And they’ll keep going. It’s human nature.
