The Printing World is Full of Clichés,,, But Not in the Way You Might Think, says Griselda Heppel
Doors closed on originality? Photo by burcubyzt_85: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/vintage-wooden-door-with-distinctive- handles-36306962/ I learnt something new on X the other day. (And no, it wasn’t the latest cancellations, though there’s plenty of that going on). I can’t remember how it came up, but both Lissa Evans (a writer I greatly admire) and I were intrigued to discover the origin of the term cliché. I am rather ashamed that I never bothered to look it up before. I’d always assumed it had something to do with the French for a door closing: a boring, hackneyed phrase shutting off originality. Goodness knows where I got that notion from because it’s definitely barking up the wrong tree (an idiom, by the way, not a cliché; a nice distinction I found going down rabbit holes online… oops, there goes another). How to describe a beautiful sunset and bring it freshly to life. Instead, the verb clicher means ‘to click’. Its use as a noun goes back as far as 1825 and originat...