Question #185 Cliches
Do you ever have conversations with people where you get lazy, and just respond with some old, standby phrase to make it sound like you were actually listening, or care, like, "Well, it takes all kinds..."?
My question is, what are your favorite cliches?
18 comments:
I have a love/hate relationship with cliches. My favorites are those that deal with time and space and distance, like, "At the end of the day..." and "turned a corner," "home stretch."
Oh, also "up your alley."
"I'm getting way too old for this shit," or alternatively, "This is the shit I'm getting too old for."
"Shit happens" is one of my favorites, especially if it's followed by "when you party naked."
When I talk I think it's just a barrage of cliches strung together haphazardly with a few ands and buts. I wish I said "looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue" more often.
my grandfather use to say some amazing ones like "shaking like a dog shitting razorblades", "colder than a witches tit", and "noiser than two skeletons fuckin' on a tin roof".
i guess those are all predominatly southern in origin, which sounds about right. he was really southern at heart. he could out-ramble hank williams in a ramblin' man contest. (which, i think, is a lost art that should be brought back).
Like phil, my speech is usually a barrage of cliches strung together. Unlike him, mine are not haphazardly but are rather act as a series of macros triggered by things I or other people say.
For example: I will listen for when I or somebody else makes a metaphor and say "literally" after it. This may have been funny once but, in the typical style, it has been run into the ground so far that it is little more than a reflex.
These sorts of triggers and macros may involve the temporal lobe of my brain at best, since I think this is what controls our hearing and mouth, but I think for a lot of things my brain has made a shortcut to just route directly from ears to mouth.
For sure whatever makes me say the ice cube stanza whenever anybody says anything mentioned in that stanza involves absolutely no thought or reason. It is like my heart beating or my digestive system; something my body does but my mind can't control.
Oh, to answer the question, my favorite cliché is "X, that's my middle name". Literally.
"Well, I've been shit kicked and dipped in cement."
Used to express incredible surprise! That's how I use it anyway. I heard it when I was about 14, which is the one and only time I've heard it used in conversation by someone other than myself. But I function under the assumption that there is a small town in West Virginia, maybe Ohio, where this phrase is ingrained into the township vernacular. Otherwise, it's just some stupid shit I say and not really a cliche at all.
from a questionable source, "the sun shines on a dog's ass occasionally."
from johnny p, "looks like a monkey fucking a football."
I guess that I use more than I had thought... I say things like 'better to be safe than sorry', 'don't be a doubting thomas', 'finger in every pie', and I quite often think that things are 'fancy dancy' or sometimes even 'shmancy'
I guess this is the product of having a kindergarten teacher as a mother.
Here's just a small selection of the many things that fly out of my mouth when I want another person to end their inane diatribe (of which I can not stand a second more.)
They are often muttered unbeknown to myself and completely out of my immediate control. I like to think of it as a product of the "fight or flight" syndrome.
READ: "I don't want to fight you for telling me a shitty, boring, or otherwise obnoxious story...so I gotta go now."
"[*Sigh*] Well, to each his own."
"It'll all even out in the end."
"It's six in one hand, half dozen in the other, I suppose..."
"Your cupcakes are showing."
Ok, so that last one isn't actually a part of my "conversation ender pool" so much as it's what I'm gonna say to you when your butt cheeks are hanging out the bottom of your short-shorts.
Dang. And I thought Beth just used that last line on me to end the conversation; guess I better get some longer short-shorts.
"It is what it is" accompanied by a shrug is often used by me at the workplace. I immediately shudder inside after I use it.
At the office I feel as though I am playing an obnoxious office caricature in a skit that won't end, and the dialogue I am to use is full of horrific cliches.
Can you tell I am having a wonderful day at work?
Alright time to get back tot he daily grind!
If 'go fuck yourself' is cliche' then that is my favorite.
I'm fond of "better late than pregnant".
Update> I was just called out for a cliche yesterday... Apparently I said that someone had a 'bee in their bonnet'
How old AM I?!
I like noticing when people fuck up cliches.
Someone at work yesterday said to someone else. "Well now it's like we let the bull out of the china shop."
or
"Holy choke!"
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