![]() ![]() ![]() When Israel complained about eating manna, honestly, I can identify with them. If someone quotes or refers to Psalm 23, should I glibly think, “Shepherd, sheep, got it,” and move on? But does the frequency with which we hear this verse null its meaning and effectiveness? It shouldn’t. They mean well, but they want to “fix” the problem instead of weeping with those who weep, and then the verse becomes a conversation-stopper. What about Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Granted, sometimes people use this verse like a band-aid on cancer. The fact that they seemed overused was a problem in my own heart. For a while, I almost cringed when I heard these songs announced or heard their opening notes.īut was there anything wrong with the songs? No, they are all wonderful expressions of Biblical truth. In another church my husband and I attended several years ago, a frequent congregational song was “ Til the Storm Passes By.” In another place, it seemed like I heard “ Be Thou My Vision” almost every week. In the church I attended in my teens and college years, we sang “ Victory in Jesus” quite a lot. ![]() It’s possible to let truth become cliche spiritually as well, isn’t it? For instance, if you’re telling someone your troubles, and they respond, “That’s just the way the cookie crumbles” or “Into each life some rain must fall” (though the latter is from a poem), they’re not really interested in hearing you. But some cliches are used to stop a conversation, according to Wikipedia. Most of us use cliches thoughtlessly out of habit-thus the admonition to watch for and eliminate them from our writing and speech. We gloss over it or even get irritated by it. The phrase still meant what it always did, but we don’t hear it the same any more. Then the phrase lost its luster, if not its meaning. But people heard it so much, they got tired of it. Why was the phrase overused? Because it aptly or creatively expressed something people identified with. Most of the definitions and articles I looked up said that a phrase became a cliche through overuse. While I agree with all of the above, one day it dawned on me that the problem with cliches are not the phrases themselves. There’s nothing modern readers and publishers like so much as an original idea or a twist on an old one. Generally, though, cliches are considered trite and unoriginal. I read one article that advised tucking a few cliches into dialogue, if you’re writing fiction, so the conversations sound normal and familiar. People who write about writing tell us to avoid cliches. ![]()
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