It can be sad sometimes to see a perfectly good word end up
helplessly trapped in a prison of cliched usages. Don’t know what I’m talking
about? How about a few examples? Think of the things that you’ve recently heard
described as scathing . Were they
rebukes or criticisms? I’ll bet they were. And what about utmost ? Have you come across anything utmost that wasn’t sincerity
or respect? I doubt it. And I think we can agree that few things are as ardent
as supporters, or as insurmountable as odds.
Gall and disaster have something in common: they are about
the only things that are quite frequently unmitigated
- just as false and obvious are all-too-often patently so. And is anything
as reckless as abandon? Perhaps endangerment, maybe
driving… but mostly abandon. Disregard comes in a number of forms, but none so
common as blatant . On the other hand, nothing is nearly so
rapier as wit. Intuition tells us that a tongue could be rapier, and that wits
could be sharp, but no, it’s sharp tongues and rapier wits until the cows come
home. And don’t let yourself be guilty of switching them around.
Speaking of guilt, do we assuage anything quite so much? We might appease,
alleviate or mollify lots of things, but guilt is about the only thing we
really assuage with any regularity. We condone a lot of
things, but so often we do so tacitly
. We also come to tacit agreements, but I can’t think of many other
places where tacitness comes to the fore (I didn’t even know tacitness was a word before I looked it up for this
sentence.) We never jockey for anything but position. Aspersions are only ever cast. Things are never engulfed in anything but flames. Intrinisic value. Abject failure. Unqualified success. Thinly veiled . I could go on and on. We don’t pique many things besides
interest or curiosity, and I can’t imagine whetting anything but an appetite, can you? Ah, except
maybe a metaphorical whistle, that is. But one thing's for sure: the only thing I ever extol
are virtues.
I’m afraid words like these are, if you’ll allow me one more
cliched pairing to drive the point home, inextricably linked. (Ah, the ‘meta’ cliched coupling if
there ever was one!) But like most inextricable links (they all are these days,
aren’t they?) these pairings are probably just easy and strong, and not actually
bonds from which their constituent parts cannot be extricated.
So I say extricate them. We should grant these words a life outside the cliches. If you love words, set them free.
And here's 80's Sting for a few words on the subject:
