Casablanca is just as bad.
That whooshing sound overhead is also something of a cliché around these parts.
Only if they hang out in a group to the exclusion of others.
I rememeber watching the movie " No country for old men" Every character and most of the scenes seemed so cliche I had a hard time watching it. I was shocked when it won an award.
One needs to differentiate between good cliches and bad cliches.
Cliches are not automatically bad (though they usually are). If a character, for instance, uses a lot of them, it tells you something about the person. You can also give new life to cliches by using them in an unexpected manner.
But usually, they’re a sign of a writer who is being lazy by using old phrases and characters instead of inventing new ones.
To me, clichés are those phrases that pop up in people’s minds in certain situations.
E.g., you see someone standing at a stove looking at a pan of water heating. “A watched pot never boils.” pops into your head. You can’t help it. It’s suddenly just there in your mind. Yours and millions of other people. It’s just so expected.
In terms of writing and such, a hack writer will put such a phrase in. Better writers won’t. Unless, of course, they are putting it into the mouth of a deliberately dull character.
Consider the phrase “Suddenly, it hit me like a …”. Good writers find novel ways to finish this. (Or, even better, restructure the whole thing.)
Otherwise you’ll just be flogging a dead horse.
You’ll never get it to drink that way. :dubious:
Well, you can lead a horticulture…
Here is the most recent example of my complaint. The following is a stanza from a poem I wrote, and my critic opined that the reference to the girl in Amsterdam was a cliche. I didn’t, and do not, agree.
There was a girl in Amsterdam,
and in the East a Buddha.
From one I learned the ways of love;
compassion from the other.
Regards, Medici.
The line “There (once) was a boy/girl from x” is used a lot to start silly, often dirty limericks.
I agree with this. It’s not the “girl in Amsterdam” that’s the cliche, it’s the phrasing “There was a (person) from (place)”. The dirty limericks WilyQuixote refers to are enough by themselves to render any attempt at using it in poetry cliche. It’s also been done to death on other forms of writing of course.
It’s the equivalent to starting a poem with “I once had/knew/saw a (noun)”. It doesn’t matter what the noun is, the phrasing is incredibly tired.
A simple rephrasing to “I knew a girl in Amsterdam” or “A girl there was in Amsterdam” would be a simple way to de-cliche it.
It would scan better like this:
In Amsterdam,there was a girl,
and in the East a Buddha.
From one I learned the ways of love;
compassion from the other.
… in the US. In the UK it will be falsely attributed to Shakespeare or Winston Churchill.
Medici writes:
> . . . my critic opined that the reference to the girl in Amsterdam was a cliche . . .
Why do you care what this person said? Is this the editor of a publishing house that’s considering publishing your book of poetry? Then maybe their comment is important. If it’s just some random nobody on the Internet, who cares what they think? (Hmm, of course I’m just some random nobody on the Internet.) My only comment on the four lines you showed us is not that it’s possible to slightly rephrase them to make it seem a little better, as bob++ and Blake have, but that it doesn’t sound like a very interesting opening to a poem. You’re going to write a poem about how you learned about romantic and spiritual matters? It doesn’t sound particularly poetic to me. It sounds like a short essay about your life. Why not just write a short essay about your life?
In all seriousness, Shakespeare did use a lot of cliches. Only about 10% of his plots were original; most of the rest was what we would call “adaptations” today. And despite that lack of originality, he managed to produce the greatest literature in the entire English language. Originality is overrated.
With a girl in Amsterdam, there’s a sailor who sings
of the dreams that he brings from the wide open seas.
With a girl in Amsterdam, there’s a sailor who sleeps
while the riverbank weeps through the old willow trees.
With a girl in Amsterdam, there’s a sailor who dies full of beer,
full of cries in a drunken down fight.
With a girl in Amsterdam, there a sailor who’s born
on a muggy hot morn, by the dawn’s early light.
For those of you who don’t recognize that, DrFidelius is changing the words of a Jacques Brel song which has been recorded by various other singers: