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Cliches and Terms of Art
Some folks at
Factiva (a huge news database) identified 55 cliches and searched the Factiva database to determine which ones were used most often. Read about the study
here.
The winning cliche among U.S. media was “at the end of the day,” which was used 10,595 times during the first half of 2006. The Washington Post and the New York Times each used the term 135 times during that period. (Thanks to
Writing Clear and Simple for this link)
These were just some of the other clichés:
- A laugh a minute
- All the way to the bank
- Bated breath
- Blazing inferno
- Call it a day
I don’t think I use those particular clichés in legal writing and don’t think that I have seen them very often in briefs written by other lawyers. But lawyers do regularly use their own unique clichés, even giving them revered status as “terms of art.” For examples, just read some entries at
Adamsdrafting about boilerplate language. As Ken points out, when you really think about these lawyerly clichés, they don’t make much sense, but we use them and even defend our use of them.
So the next time you use a phrase that you seem to use a lot in your legal writing, step back and think about what it really means and what you are really trying to say.
On a slightly related note, think about why we use clichés. Is it because we simply don’t have the words to express what we want to say or is it a deeper communication problem? Here is a suggestion from
Mark Liberman at Language Log.
If you can't express what you feel, the problem is probably not too few word choices, and it's probably not too many word choices either. Maybe your real problem is getting in touch with your feelings, or connecting your amygdala to your cerebral cortex, or finding the right metaphor, or coming to terms with the essential ineffability of experience. But as a practical matter, whatever you can do to express yourself will comes down to choosing a sequence of words. And no matter how big your vocabulary is, it's dwarfed by the exponential explosion of combinatoric possibilities when you combine words into phrases.
