Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
A cliché is anything that has become trite or commonplace through overuse. At a place where I sometimes dine on BBQ ribs, I’ve often heard that “the meat falls right off the bone.” It matters little whether that means it’s tender, or easy to chew, or overcooked, it’s a cliché there. True enough, that meat does fall right off the bone. You can depend on it. It’s not only tried and true; it’s TIRED and true.
We are starved for what is new and different. A complaint about California weather voiced by people from the center of the continent is that there’s no variety. “If you want to know what the weather will be tomorrow, look out the window today.” Living in a place where the temperature or humidity might soar or drop within the next 30 minutes is thrilling. California is not. The chance of change provides a non-controversial and non-confrontational topic for conversation. You can’t do anything about the weather, but you can sure talk about it.
On Friday our local paper carries a page or two of church news and religious commentary. I find myself wishing that one of the columnists would write something new. The atmosphere is such that even the “Mostly Secular Alliance” group spouts banality. Not everyone has to agree on religion. Disagreement might even foster thought and expression renewal. What’s sad is to see good words like righteousness, sacrifice, salvation and even sin rendered emptily banal by the ways they are thrown around. These words and others are robbed of meaning. They become devoid of freshness or originality. They are hackneyed and trite in many religious conversations.
In a way similar to how people leading public prayer need to pay attention to their “justs” (as in “Jesus we just want to praise you, etc.) we need to pay attention to how we use words. We might even consider keeping each other accountable for what we mean by the ones we use. That applies to religious conversation, political debates, sports talk and even complaining about the weather.
David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.
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