A desperate plea for proverb – free writing
Tips for staying away from the cliches that seem as unavoidable as death and taxes
Pastiche
Benjamin Baxter
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PROVERBS ARE GENERALLY accepted as truisms, though they are rarely, if ever, true. That’s not to say that the axioms we love so dearly are always wrong, as to say that would be also be a hasty generalization. They just tend to be the kind of hand-me-down advice composed of hasty generalizations or simply consecutive appeals to authority, tradition and common practice.
An even worse scenario is that too often clichés are mistaken as proverbs, and by extension are assumed to be true in that they express facets of reality.
One of the least meaningful and most apt for use as conversation filler as any of these involves some kind of beneficence caused by timely knitting. Whether or not and however “a stitch in time” might possibly “save nine,” it sure filled up this paragraph.
And that is certainly the whole point of the maxims that flood dryly thoughtless conversations. I could care less about pedagogy of elderly canines, but the difficulty in educating to such animals the latest fashions seems to be well-considered if not well-documented.
As I succumb to an idiom which is nearly as irritating, there is a grain of truth in these proverbs which prevents them from being entirely fallacious. The point of such a phrase is usually rather sharp, if somewhat lost upon some people who use them.
Most people probably realize that the idea behind old dogs and new tricks refers to the permanency of practiced habits among those well out of adolescence and that stitches in time have nothing to do with string theory, especially if one is not using strings but yarn.
That most people understand what these phrases mean would especially apply to people who were planning to write angry letters telling me why I’m shortsighted and foolish, but I also suppose that such hotheaded people stopped reading this quite a long while ago.
Nonetheless, it stands to reason that a cliché should be avoided like the plague, as such speech figures render one’s writing as dry as a bone.
No longer shall we be oppressed by cohorts of clouded thinking, dearest readers. Free yourself from faulty conclusions accepted part and parcel as wisdom of the more wise, lest ye be in a right passel of trouble.
Of course, colloquialisms are perfectly acceptable.
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