FWIW, Merriam Webster also lists the adjectival form of cliché. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use “cliché” with the “d” appended to it for it’s adjectival form–invariably, I hear “That’s cliché” rather than “That’s clichéd.”
Toushay
The first definition on the cite uses cliche as an adjective as a substute for cliched.
Wow, I had no idea this topic would generate so much interest! 
I use cliché as both a noun (count and noncount) and an adjective. So do most of the snobby lit-heads I know.
Interestingly, if I read that dictionary.com entry correctly, the word may actually have been borrowed into English as a noun.
OK, now we have have a place to begin.
Trying to refute a specific by giving a link to a page that contains a variety of material is an internet debating trick that I won’t respond to, because in my experience it means that the linker isn’t sure of the answer and hopes that the other party will pick out the right piece of information for him or her. You know, some day I should take all those how-not-to-address-the-question tactics and put together a compendium of internet debating tricks. I wouldn’t even have to leave this site to make it many pages long.
However, you’ve corrected my impression and given me the specific. That changes everything.
Modern dictionaries are descriptivist. They record common uses of language rather than dictating right and wrong. Common uses of language are often wrong, sometimes ridiculously so. Look at how many pit threads they have been about people who put apostrophes into plurals. I read someone’s spelling of ours as “our’s” the other day. This morning I saw the editor of the paper’s editorial page actually use [this other guy] and myself instead of [this other guy] and me. I saw legions of copyeditors rolling in their graves.
Now I’m a recovering prescriptivist. I used to be strict and haughty about meanings and usages. Then I started studying linguistics and the history of the English language and realized that’s not the way English works, historically or today. At the same time I understood that each and every person, even the most lenient descriptivist, draws lines in the language, and has a set of usages that are accepted and a set that look just plain wrong. The above two examples are just plain wrong. Common as all get out, but still wrong.
As I said earlier in the thread, I checked a dictionary before commenting. The American Heritage Third Edition to be exact. A very good dictionary. It doesn’t list any sense of cliché as an adjective. I checked the newer Microsoft Encarta dictionary just to be sure. Nothing there either.
I didn’t expect there would be. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone use cliché as the OP did in the thread title.
I admit I’m flabbergasted to see that Random House is listing it. I did some checking online, but all I found were a few usage comments answering people who asked about that usage’s correctness, all of them treating it, properly, like nails on a blackboard.
Apparently, however, enough people use the term wrongly so that it’s existence is acknowledged. In one dictionary. That does not make it correct or legitimate, It just means that the word is used.
So I concede that you have found a dictionary citation.
However, another internet debating trick is the shifting of the argument away from the original statement to a different statement more amenable of proof.
What was your original statement?
That was the statement I termed absolutely incorrect. I stand by my term.
How can I do that if cliché is cited as an adjective? Because of the process.
A good source for this is The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher. Deutscher gives multiple examples of how endings tend to erode in English. It’s clear that clichéd was for hundreds of years the only acceptable use of the word as an adjective. That it came from French was irrelevant. It was one of the standard processes in English that cause people to start dropping the [d] to use it as simply cliché. But that’s because people are treating it as an English word not as a French word.
Oh and that brings up Frank:
I don’t know if he was being snarky or thought he was scoring a point. But the simple answer is that it’s perfectly acceptable in English to retain the diacritical marks of loan words for a period until they are eroded away by time and custom. Cliché and clichéd retain the accent and yet are English. How do we know? True foreign words and terms that are used are italicized in print. Clichéd is not. It’s English, not French.
And “politically incorrect” humor is getting cliché is wrong. It may be an increasingly common usage but it hasn’t gained acceptance yet. That’s not what finding the meaning in a dictionary means.
So I give you one minor point, but I maintain my stand on all the major ones.
It was a question. I don’t use the accent. I’m glad to know that I am a forerunner of time and custom.
Duh. (Do a search for how many times I’ve said this, since you seem to think I have no earthly idea what we’re talking about.)
Again with the duh, though I admire your own “debating trick” of bringing in a couple of examples that are wholly irrelevant to this discussion, as if *their *being wrong somehow supports your contention that “cliche” is wrong. Which, not.
Don’t forget to include this trope in your compendium of Internet debating tricks.
And Webster’s.
. . . and thus the language evolves.
Judging from your tactics in this very post, I assume this is meant ironically?
:rolleyes:
Dude, for all you seem to know about the way English evolves, you seem to be “flabbergasted” that, as that evolution occurs, the rules continue to change. I.e., descriptivism leads to prescriptivism: almost every usage that you consider “correct” was once “incorrect.” I.(again)e., when usage reaches a saturation point–for most people, it’s when it gets “described” by a lexicographer–it’s officially part of the language.
I may have made some inaccurate assumptions regarding why cliche is appropriate as an adjective–imported from French as is, or simply through saturation of usage–but for you to say that it’s “absolutely wrong,” when in fact it’s a style choice, is, well, absolutely wrong.
You lean more toward prescriptivism, fine. You hate the French. Whatever. But it’s ludicrous to say that an “early adopter” who uses cliche as an adjective is “absolutely wrong.”
I just came in here to say Carlos Mencia sucks, and I just narrowly avoided a heated discussion on mots emprunts and parts of speech. What the hell.
One last time and I am out of here.
I said that your explanation of the word being adopted from the French was absolutely incorrect. Look it up.
You are the one who then decided that I was saying it about the use of the word. I never did. Look it up.
This whole argument comes down to that simple point. You took my words and falsely applied them where they were never meant to go. I don’t let anyone get away with that. And you can also look that up.
Is the use wrong? Yes. That’s the risk that “early adopters” always face. Sometimes they’re early, sometimes they’re just wrong, always they will face criticism for their choice.
No, it’s not. In French, you don’t usually speak of something as being cliché as an adjective; you say that it’s un cliché, a noun. (The original meaning is a printing matrix: something copied over and over). So it came to English as a noun, not an adjective, and we made that noun into an adjective through the standard English process of adding the participle ending -d.
If some people are using cliché as an adjective in English, that’s hypercorrection and has no basis in French.
Back to the subject, I agree with Molly Ivins, who said:
Just out of curiosity, I quickly searched for “c’est cliché,” and got 12,500 hits. I got another 10,000 for “c’est un cliché,” but is the former usage slang, incorrect, English influencing French, or other?
I agree entirely. Political incorrectness has spawned too many cliché gags. Or rather, gags cliché.
Dude, you were wrong. Let it go. It’s not that huge a deal.
It is? The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest cite for “clichéd” is from 1928, and Random House, though it has apparently discredited itself on this matter in your eyes, gives a date of origin for “clichéd” of 1925-30. Now, as it happens, the OED also lists “cliché” as an adjective with the same sense, with an earliest citation from 1959. True, that is later, but it hardly seems as though the version with “d” has been sanctioned by the length of history in a manner which the version without comes nowhere near.
(Cite)
I have a question: I mean living in New York, where I know from personal experience it snows and gets cold as hell, where in the world do you buy hats to fit you? Your dictionary is correct and the OP’s is not? That might be a new record for hutzpah. Come on go ahead and tell me the correct speling.
“Getting cliché” to me reads like “that’s so 5 minutes ago” or “you need to be 10% more rasta”. Using a noun as an adjective, which is perfectly acceptable in today’s English usage. It’s just a subtly different construction than “Getting clichéd”, which would be using an adjective as an adjective, and if the OP had intended it as such it would be wrong to my eyes, since it did not communicate that idea effectively.
What makes you think “Rasta” is a noun in that construction? It seems to me short for “Rastafarian”, and while “Rastafarian” can be a noun, it can also be an adjective (just like “Christian”).
Oh Mon dieu! Enough with the hijack already!!!
Laughter usually comes from a surprise or unexpected turn of events (Not in the bad way, say like your loveble furry baby faced kitty being run over, but in the fun way like when your neighbours stanky manky poop-in-your-garden, fat gross cat is run over, by a clown car)
Being “un PC” is supposed to shock and surprise us but when every comedian is doing it there is no surprise or shock. It just becomes boring.
Now Sterotyping will never go away, its our lazy human minds way of sorting things. There will always be a place for it in comedy (All women drivers are awful, everyone else is stupied etc) just right now these comedians are being lazy with it and using the taboo aspect alone to generate laughs.