A cliché is anything that is overused, often to the point of being rendered meaningless.

Contents

1 Cliché expressions and their meanings 2 Clichés in literature 3 Clichés in film and cartoons 4 Clichés on the Internet 5 Clichés in television 6 Clichés in theater 7 Related topics 8 External links

Cliché expressions and their meanings

• At this/that point in time. . . - Now/then. (Overused famously by certain Watergate scandal members of the Richard M. Nixon presidential administration.)
• At the end of the day, ... - In summary, ...
• Can't see your nose in front of your face - It's really hard to see.
• Cat got your tongue? - Why haven't you been talking?
• The grass is always greener on the other side - Anything someone else has seems better.
• Get to the calf through the cow - The best way to get to the girl is through her mother.
• Give up the ghost - to die, expire or otherwise come to an end
• Killing two birds with one stone - Completing two tasks with one process.
• Let me bounce this off of you... - To present a scenario or idea for the purpose of receiving feedback or critique
• Pot calling the Kettle black - When a person criticizes another for behaviours which they themselves exhibit as well
• Putting the cart before the horse - To come to a conclusion without suitably indicative evidence, or also trying to skip steps in a process or task
• Reading between the lines - Infering information.
• Six of one, half-a-dozen of another - The result is the same in either case.
• What is coming down the pike... (often misquoted as '...down the pipe') - events or happenings expected to come to pass in the near future.
• What's good for the goose is good for the gander - If something is good for one person, it follows that it's good for everyone.
• What goes around comes around - If you do something good (bad), good (bad) things will happen to you.
• Can't organize oneself out of a paper bag - One is poorly equipped to handle the simplest of tasks.
• A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B - An answer to an either/or question implying that both answers are correct.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Originally a song of protest against the perceived "white media" by Gil-Scott Heron, the phrase is now casually bandied about on pundit blogs and MTV .

Clichés in literature

• It was a dark and stormy night. — Opening line of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's novel Paul Clifford (1830). Also used by the comic strip character Snoopy as he was writing fiction in Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.

This phrase is also used as the title of collections of entries from the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest of prospective opening lines for bad novels. This sentence was also the opening line of Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's fantasy novel, A Wrinkle in Time (1960).

• Princess and dragon tales.

Clichés in film and cartoons

• Spaceships, enemy bases, etc. have a self-destruct mechanism. This mechanism can sometimes be activated by accident, often by merely pressing a button.
• Spaceships, enemy bases, etc. have potentially harmful automated systems (such as automated doors, elevators etc...) with no safety devices (e.g no circuit breakers, so electrical shorts kill random crew members during attacks).
• Any spaceship can have it's control and command usurped from an access panel in an arbitrary hallway
• Time bombs have a large LED readout counting down to detonation, and have colour-coded wire to help the hero defuse them.
• Aliens are fluent in human languages, or easily communicated with via universal translator devices.
• Car chases will pass through a downtown farmers' market, and will knock over some fruit, and possibly release some chickens.
  • This will be followed by driving through an alleyway stacked high with empty cardboard boxes.
  • If the chase reaches a motorway, it will always be under construction. At some point a half-finished bridge will have to be leaped.
  • The police will be impeded either by workers carrying a pane of glass across the street, by a lorry maneuvering in an alleyway, or by a freight train crossing a road.
• When a sequel is made to a film that turned out to be more successful than first thought, and in the first film a popular character died, there will often be some sleight-of-hand to explain that they didn't really die. (It also cuts both ways, however: for example, Men in Black II and The Klumps have to explain why certain significant characters from their respective predecessors, Men in Black and The Nutty Professor, are not in the sequel.)
• The future in films can either be:
  • Post-apocalyptic.
  • Giant cities where it's always night.
• The laws of physics are bunk. Sound travels in space, and lasers beams are visible from the side.
• Anybody who has to do "one last mission" before retirement and/or says "what could possibly go wrong?" is dead meat. So are police officers just days from retirement (if they're not the main character, that is), and soldiers who carry a photo of their special someone around.
• No matter how many times the hero is shot, stabbed, etc., he never dies; but whenever a bad guy receives an affliction, he is dead immediately.
  • Unless the bad guy is a serial killer or other similar slasher movie character, who will only seem to be dead for just long enough to rear up and attack somebody else before getting finally killed by some definitive method.
• Grievous wounds that are non-fatal but meant to be scary are always in the shoulder.
• Villains use automatic weapons to shoot at the heroes but never hit them; the heroes meanwhile, can kill a villain at 100 feet with a single shot from a handgun. Until the 1960s, heroes were often shown shooting weapons out of villains' hands.
• The death of secondary villains is never insisted upon, for they are considered expendable. They may have to look ugly or un-human so the spectator cannot relate to them (example: the Imperial Stormtroopers of the Star Wars series, fully clad in a body armor that makes them look like robots).
• No matter how futuristic the handweapon is, the hero can usually dispatch his targets with one shot, while villainous henchmen generally can't hit the hero no matter how many shots they fire (and giving the hero numerous opportunities to literally dodge many shots).
• Someone fatally shot by a single bullet will demonstrate dramatic body movement, such as flailing arms, taking many steps or leaping through the air, and rolling on the ground, instead of simply collapsing in a heap.
• Villains who are just about to kill a good character are always stopped at the very last moment by multiple gunshots fired at them (usually from the back)
• The villain is full of pride - they can't resist revealing their full plan to the hero, giving them time to escape. (Kevin Smith's Dogma has a scene that pokes fun at its use in James Bond films, and Jerry Seinfeld has poked fun at it as well.)
• Sports coaches are usually
  • Rueful of how an injury cost him/her a pro career (Rodney Dangerfield pokes fun at it in Ladybugs as he kisses up to his boss to get a soccer coaching job), or
  • A has-been athlete, usually drunk (e.g. Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own)
• Underperforming athletes will come up big when it really matters.
• The big final game of the season is always decided on the last play, with the clock running out or whatever equivalent there is in that sport.
• Previously silent significant characters speak up towards the film's end. (example: Gone In 60 Seconds, exception: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle)
• In a large crowd of people, only one or two of them will speak (to minimise the money that has to be paid to the actors)
• The bad guys will always be out to take over the world or destroy it.
• One common story-telling cliche in movies is showing the main character as a kid, for character-establishing purposes (e.g. Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner, Jodie Foster in Contact).
• In American Comedies, whenever there's incoming trouble, the background music is a cha-cha.
• An assassination often occurs while Italian opera music is being played at a loud volume in the victim's home.
• Scientists are presented as humourless, usually crazed or at least absent-minded individuals out of touch with the world around them (see Cuthbert Calculus, Doc Brown).
• Ordinary people solve a problem that stumped all scientists, and go on to save everyone.
• People may make efficient advanced tools out of ordinary objects, with no hesitation, trial-and-error, or documentation (see McGyver series).
• By the end of the film, the scientist characters will either have been killed off or have rejected science and "converted" to belief in the paranormal [1]
• A jury verdict delivered after a very short deliberation is most often one of Guilty.
• When a slide or film projector is used, a character must stand in the beam so the image is projected directly on their body.
• When computers or the Internet are involved:
  • There is often a teenager able to crack into high-security systems using a home computer and computing and social engineering skills (see War Games).
  • Passwords are often guessable and related to the topic (like somebody's maiden name).
  • There are never any compatibility problems, nor is there any slowness or network problems when accessing systems, except when it is critical to the plot. People are able to make complex requests, and computers are able to answer them, in a matter of seconds.
  • Computer displays don't bear any resemblance to current operating systems. They are far more animated than normal computer displays. For instance, text requested from a database will appear one character at a time, instead of all at once. Photographs will be rendered incrementally. Windows will move into position automatically and with special effects. Characters will be large enough so as to be legible to the audience without having to focus solely on the computer display.
  • Indications such as "ACCESS DENIED", "CLASSIFIED" or "CONFIDENTIAL " will appear in enormous, blinking, red characters across the screen.
• Especially in American movies, foreign countries will usually be depicted in the most picturesque way, often with the implication that they are backwards compared to the United States.
  • If there is a brief Paris street view, accordion music is heard (even though accordion is seldom heard in the streets of Paris nowadays, except in touristic areas).
  • The police in most continental European countries will have wide powers to arrest people, and suspects won't have many legal rights.
• In American movies: If there is a global natural disaster, it will never start in the ocean or vast expanses of uninhabited land, but rather it will always strike the most populated cities in Asia or Europe before wreaking havoc in the United States.
• In American movies: if aliens land on earth, they will land in the United States first.
• Saving the United States of America from destruction is tantamount to saving the World from destruction.
• When looking for a secret base, a hero in spy films is often attacked by sentries, even when s/he is about to give up the search. They are beaten off and the hero now knows that it must be nearby to have it guarded.
• If most of the characters are American, anyone who speaks with an English or British accent will be a villain.
• An "obviously foreign-looking" character is assumed to not speak the native language, but suddenly reveals total fluency with no accent. In American movies, this is typically someone "oriental".
• A homely woman can become a beauty by abandoning her glasses and pulled-back hairdo.
• Any character who arrives on the scene on a motorcycle, wearing a helmet, with a tinted visor will be revealed to be a woman through the removal of the helmet and display of long hair.
• All shopping bags contain at least one baguette.
• Were you to look inside a cartoon character's closet or bureau, you would find that he really will have several sets of the exact same clothing.

Clichés on the Internet

• As seen in Photoshop contests on Drew Curtis' Fark.com: Domo-kun, Admiral Ackbar ("It's a trap!"), the "Nutsack Squirrel," the "Mustard Man," and many others.
• The All Your Base craze
• Mee too! in usenet posts.
• Goatse.cx
• Bert is Evil
• Don't feed the trolls! in usenet posts and forums.
• Leetspeak
• Micro$oft

Clichés in television

... as well as other TV stereotypes, can be found on these particular websites:

• The Big Fat List of TV Cliches
• Television Tropes & Idioms (a wiki)

Not surprisingly, many of them are carry-overs from film, and not surprisingly, they are most employed in sitcoms and animated series. Shows like The Simpsons have been known to break cliche quite often.

Clichés in theater

• See Tom Stoppard's play "The Real Inspector Hound"

Related topics

• List of English proverbs

External links

• The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés
• Things you would never know without the movies this list is reprinted on different websites - no original author known
• ClichéSite.com For Cliche Expressions
• Peter's Evil Overlord List
• Cliché Finder
• The Book of Clichés, phrases to say in times of trouble
• The Movie Clichés List
• The Sports Cliché List