What’s beyond cliché? What’s the term for those phrases so thoughtlessly mentioned that they make mere clichés seem fresh and sparkly?
I suspect that most of my friends consider me a foodie and consider that a compliment. Me, perhaps it’s because I’ve known so many people who were so far beyond any stage I ever reached, I like to think I’m someone who peered into the foodie abyss and edged back. I spent many pleasant days and nights with the tribe, wandering hither and yon (cliché!) for the sake of a meal and a shared experience. And migawd let’s not mention bacon (cliché!). But by and large my interest in food is in eating good food, and the lesson I learned from the tribe was to use good ingredients. Having learned that, for the most part (cliché!) I moved on.
In a handful of cities around the country PBS stations have a local show called “Check, Please!” in which regular people (cliché!) talk about their favorite restaurants. (The show debuted here and was franchised to other cities’ PBS stations.) Whether it’s a foodie show depends, of course, on whether or not you’re a foodie: To the people who like food, enjoy it, but don’t obsess over it, it absolutely is, because here are all of these people talking about their favorite restaurants. But the tribe I hung out with back in the day would snarl over each episode, sneering at the choices and grunting that these great unwashed were wallowing in mediocrity, denying themselves (and the rest of the city) the true pleasures of the city’s most sublime dining options, the ones they’d “discovered” themselves. (Because no restaurant exists to the tribe until one of them has “discovered” it and had the tribe vet it, after which the tribe and the “discoverer” alike discuss how smart they were to “discover” it.)
All that is background for a smaller point that circles back to our introductory sentence here, the notion that there’s something yet more banal than a cliché. Banality, I think, increases as the metaphors stretch, and the one phrase shared by the tribe and the “Check, Please!” reviewers is “to die for.”
Most of us have said this, haven’t we? Well, I haven’t, but maybe you have. On the tribe’s Web site, it’s been said some three thousand and eighty times. (The link is to a Google search of the site for the phrase.) No simple search facility is available for “Check, Please!” so we’ll have to engage in the kind of anecdotal research that prompts me to stare off into space and decide, “A lot.” (A similar search finds six hundred and twenty-three results, but we can’t assume the transcripts are accurate. But with three restaurants discussed on each of the 13 shows each season, that’s a lot of courses to die for.)
Is this the ultimate compliment? Is it a long-story-short (cliché!) way of saying “This is so good I’d choose it for my last meal”? Because that’s the banality. Chicago alone seems to have about 3,700 last meals to choose from according to our self-selected meal selectors.
In the meantime, I note that this was a very long ramble to make a very small point, which, in the blog world, is perhaps the biggest cliché of all.