I regularly see the word “cliché” used as an adjective, eg “that is so cliché” or “this is yet another cliché action movie”. This usage always used to jump out at me as wrong - I’ve always considered cliché to be a noun, with clichéd as the adjective - something is a cliché, but it is clichéd. My (British) English dictionary backs this up.
Of course, when I actually thought about it, this “incorrect” usage makes more sense, since of course “cliché” is an adjective (or past participle) in French (form clicher meaning to stereotype). So my question is: is the usage of cliché as an adjective considered correct in American usage? Or should it be clichéd there, too.
American English has always had a tendency to make nouns out of other parts of speech.
This grates on the ears of careful speakers and pedants (not always synonymous) but is inevitable.
I have to say that cliché in place of clichéd in the uses you give grates on my own careful speaker, non-pedant ear. It’s just too early to tell whether this is and will remain a solecism or is a new usage on its way to being accepted.
“Cliché” as an adjective shows up in my students’ papers all the time, and it drives me CRAZY. Same thing with “bias” and “prejudice” for “biased” and “prejudiced.”
I think it may be a dialect thing; I teach at a state university in the South (no prizes for guessing which one), and many of the students don’t pronounce the soft -ed ending in everyday speech. I’m curious to know if this is as prevalent in other parts of the country.
I hate that misuse of “impact” but I hate even more people who don’t know the difference between “effect” and “affect”. “Impact” can only be used in place of “effect”.
Fretful Porpentine - if you have a trained or some ass-kicking audio equipment, you’d find that your students do put something like the ED ending on words. It’s just very, very soft. For instance, you might not be able to hear the difference if a woman was to say “Who my baby daddy?” as a question about paternity, and then “Who my baby, daddy?” flirtatiously, but there would be a wee 'postrophe S on the first “Who.”
Is you is or is you ain’t a porcupine? What’s this beast called Porpentine? Did you wash up on a beach in Chile?
Well, it’s Elizabethan for “porcupine” – only most Europeans back then had never seen a porcupine, so when they tried to draw or engrave one from a written description, they came up with a very fearsome beast indeed. So yeah, I’d say a porpentine is like a porcupine, only spikier and with something resembling fangs. Wish I could find a picture on the web, but no luck.
Never been to Chile, but I mean to one of these days.
My suggestion is to buy a 1970’s vintage American dictionary. There seemed to be a more glacial drift in the language back then, not the inundation of coinages we suffer through now. I don’t so much mind innovation, e.g., impact as a verb, which seem logical extensions of language, and whose meaning is both clear and does not supplant a pre-existing variant, as does cliche vs. cliched. What irks me is when “a little learning”, that dangerous thing, comes into play. I can almost feel the smugness radiating from users of “cliche” and “coup de grahhhh” who, misapprehending the French grammar or pronunciation, probably think that THEY are the literate ones, and that “cliched” and “coup de grace” are embarrassing mistakes on others’ parts. My personal theory is that such barbarisms as “step foot” and “heart wrenching” are so quickly spread because they are seized upon by local TV news readers, and very quickly assume an air of legitimacy that might have required 25 years of misuse before being deemed acceptable usage.
Cliché is already the past participle of clicher in the French, so, all you grammar mavens are OK with demanding that it be turned into ‘clichéd’ as some God awful bastardized form of a past participle acquired as a noun and re-adjectivized by using the English past participle form?
“Cliché” is used as a noun in France and I suspect it was borrowed into English as such. I didn’t even know the verb “clicher” existed before reading your post.
This is correct. As a general rule, don’t ever say “clichéd”, and never instruct someone to use it. “Clichéd” can only be correct from a strictly descriptivist standpoint, and insisting that people use the “only correct in a descriptivist sense” version of a term will make you look stupid. Same goes for “octopi”, incidentally.
Cliché may be a past participle in French (though Clairobscur tells us it’s primarily a noun) but it’s a noun in English, and always has been.
It’s ultimately from the French verb clicher, which started out as a jargon term used by printers. It describes the striking of melted lead in order to make a cast or die, and apparently it was a variation of cliquer, to click, presumably because of the sound made by this process. Cliché meant the cast, die or plate produced by this process. This process, and the products of it, was more formally called stéréotype.
By about 1800, English had taken on stéréotype and anglicised it by dropping the accents. It was a noun, and referred to the printing process, or the product of that process. Cliché was taken on by about 1830, again with the technical senses. It retained its accent.
“Stereotype” turns up on the analogical sense of something continually or constantly repeated with change in about 1850. Cliché turns up in this sense from about 1890.
So it seems that cliché came into the language as a noun, having been borrowed from French where it was (and still is) a noun. Its use as an adjective is either an error or a back-formation, arising out of notice been taken of the fact that it has the structure of a past participle. I suspect its use as an adjective is pretty recent and it may, as the OP suggests, be confined to the US or to parts of the US.
I’m not pedantic, and I’m fine with “cliché,” (which is usually the form I use. In fact, I can’t think of any time recently where I’ve said “clichéd”). But “long-lived”? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that without the “d” at the end, if that’s what your implying.