Clichés

Clichés are things we live with on a daily basis. Trite, boring, often meaningless; well, are they really? Where do they come from? Why do they seem to have a life of their own—one might argue even eternal life of their own? The answer to such questions may actually be fairly simple: they come from the great reservoir of apodeictic truth! Clichés gain eternal life from the fact that they are actually snippets of eternal wisdom. Will Rogers would have said they derived from common sense. Heck, he probably did say it! Let’s look at some of these.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Truer words were never uttered—yes, I know that’s yet another cliché. Think about it. If we never complain (squeak), if we never ask the question why, if we never make any waves, and yes, I know that’s yet another cliché, will anybody ever do anything about anything? I posit the theory that they probably will not. So as the immortal Aesop might have said, the moral is to squeak louder, not less so, and thereby perhaps engender change. Remember, as George Santayana once wrote: “Those who do not learn from history are destined to relive it, and yes that too has become all but yet another cliché. Or…

“Burn the candle at both ends.” Oh my, this one should be a warning to us all. Burning the candle at both ends, of course, refers to being overly concerned with achievement, or even responsibility. If we are working day and night, if we never give it a rest, and yes I know that is yet another cliché, we will one day wake up to discover that life has passed us by, and that in fact nobody ever really cared, i.e., that we burned the candle at both ends. Duh, yuh think there’s a message there, cowboy! Oh yeah! Or again…

“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” Boy, oh boy, talk about a Catch 22, a rock and a hard place, oh well, you get the picture. Sometimes we simply cannot please everybody. If we make the decision to do what is right in the eyes of the one, the other will not be our friend and vice versa. Let’s say President Obama does the impossible and gets universal health care for all Americans. It is likely that the AMA will hate him because salaries for doctors will become more limited. If on the other hand he caters to the AMA, many people will remain without medical recourse. He can’t win; somebody’s not gonna be happy! And finally…

“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” Now this one is for the gamblers out there, and I know there’s a lot of you. Heck, I have to include myself in this one. Ever hang around a poker parlor. Usually, just outside the door, are a whole bunch of guys smoking cigarettes and looking desperate. Most are wearing the same t-shirt they put on four days ago, and most are hoping that they will be the one in eight million to hit the jackpot and get their money back. They have fallen into such straits because they were certain that this was going to be their day. It wasn’t. And me? When the stock market crashed a few months ago; I immediately went online and bought General Motors shares at $3; I mean I bought a lot of shares. Well, I still have my fingers crossed hoping that the chickens don’t come home to roost!

We live and die by clichés folks. Never doubt it.

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