Clichés We Live By

Abstract Clichés are all around us. Politicians, copywriters, educators, scholars, influencers, religious leaders, and a few tedious acquaintances—all use them. But never us. We wouldn’t be caught dead using a cliché. This book explores clichés, tracing their trajectory from modernity to contemporary digital and artificial intelligence (AI) eras, investigating their paradoxical nature as simultaneously banal and profound, and revealing their pervasive presence in our lives and languages. This book historicizes the concept, tracing its emergence alongside modern print culture, and provides the first comprehensive critical roadmap through various theoretical perspectives, proposing an integrative approach. Drawing insights from language philosophy and rhetoric, the authors treat clichés as events in time, defined not by objective repetition but by the subjective attribution of triteness—similar to déjà vu. Clichés are not necessarily conventional, worn-out phrases; rather, they evoke a visceral sense of “here we go again,” interpreted variably by users and receivers. Viewing clichés as negotiable constructs, the book explores their manifestations in popular discourse and literary works through self-conscious endorsement, repetitive hoarding, creative appropriation, and celebratory embrace. Finally, the book examines the interplay between clichés and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges clichés, raising questions on the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. The book demonstrates that far from being trivial, clichés are dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.