Last year Ledbury poetry festival asked poets to name their most hated words. For this year’s festival – running from 1 to 10 July – they’ve asked for the expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning. Here are their responses: please add your own.
Thinking inside the box … a careless cliche user reflects on their usage while trying to escape Adam Horovitz’s cardboard punishment. Photograph: Getty.
Adam Horovitz
Word or phrase: “Thinking outside the box”
Why? This phrase came and bit me whilst I was considering a number of words and phrases. A friend asked if I was unwell. I told them I was thinking about defunct, soiled and spoiled words and phrases and was having trouble settling on the worst one. “Try thinking outside the box!” said my friend with a twinkle in her eye, which I missed because I became so suddenly agitated by her use of this appalling phrase. I believe that I may have wished loudly for everyone who continued to encourage people to “think outside the box” to be sellotaped inside a cardboard box while philosophers ignored their muffled cries and considered whether the prisoners were thinking or not thinking, sealed within their cardboard tombs. “Chill out!” my friend said, laughing, knowing all too well what she was doing and stepping away so she didn’t have to listen to the grinding squeak of my teeth.
Allison McVety
Word or phrase: “Devastated”
Why? For the death of a child, or the aftermath of an earthquake, for the casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, for abuse of any kind – certainly; for a cancelled flight, a missed goal or a broken handbag strap – surely not.
Anne Caldwell
Word or phrase: “No one ever died of a broken heart”
Why? This phrase was something that people used to say to me when I was younger and I have probably said to friends in distress!
I think it is a platitude and a worn-out sentiment in some respects. However, as I get older, I have now come across couples from my mother’s generation who have been married for a long time and then died within weeks or months of each other. Humans are emotional and physical beings and in my mind the two are tied together in complicated ways. As a poet, this is territory worth exploring more deeply.
Annie Freud
Word or phrase: “Tectonic plates”
Why? Gives the feeling I am being told to feel something large, old, significant and grand
Helen Ivory
Word or phrase: “I was devastated/it was devastating”
Why? A modern cliche overused by people whose lives have been laid to waste; such as those who do not go through to the next round of X-Factor. “I will be devastated if I do not win Come Dine With Me, win the Champion’s League, find my handbag.” It makes a mockery of the those whose lives have been devastated by say, war or earthquake.
James Geary
Word or phrase: “Literally”
Why? One of the great testaments to the power of metaphor, and the malleability of language, is the metaphorical use of the word “literally”. My kids do this all the time: There were “literally” a million people there, or I “literally” died I was so scared. When people use literally in this way, they mean it metaphorically, of course. It’s a worn-out word, though, because it prevents people from thinking up a fresh metaphor for whatever it is they want to describe. And that’s a shame, because the word literal is actually a beautiful and evocative metaphor in itself. It is derived from the Latin verb linire, meaning “to smear”, and was transferred to litera (letter) when authors began smearing words on parchment instead of carving them into wood or stone. The roots of linire are also visible in the word “liniment,” a salve or ointment. Thus, the literal meaning of “literal” is to smear or spread, a fitting metaphor for the way metaphor oozes over rigid linguistic borders.
Jacqueline Saphra
Word or Phrase: “Cock”
Why? As editor of Magma I have found this word appearing in submitted poems with tedious frequency until it loses all – ahem – potency and meaning.
OR
“Synapses”: There is a current fashion for science-speak in poetry – obviously this is great if it comes from someone who knows what they’re talking about, but more often the language of science is adopted by non-scientists as an attempt at some kind of dubious authenticity.
Hollie McNish
Word or phrase: “LMAO”
Why? I loved the idea of a text language symbol that allowed you to show when you really wanted to get the message across to someone that you find what they’re saying absolutely hysterical, like you just had to let them know, even if you were only texting. This was the outlet, rivalled only by LMFAO. Now text conversations and “youth” targeted poetry, plays and comedy gags use this phrase so much I no longer believe there is any laughter behind it at all. Last week example from my friend. Yeah I saw film 2. LMAO…Really? LOL LMFAO…It was so funny, LMAO x Damn!
Michael Horovitz
Word or phrase: “Britain is leading the world”
Why? As so often worn by the likes of Thatcher, Blair, Jowell, Mandy, Cameron et al, a vintage example being Richard Caborn’s boast when he was minister for – er, culture, media and sport: “Britain is leading the world in the culture of online gambling”. Guardian readers will not need me to say why …
Martin Figura
Word or Phrase: “I am a very spiritual person”
Why? Exhausted on its first usage. Its vague passive-aggressive subtext implying they are a better, more moral person than you. Often uttered by the most self-centred of people, possibly while getting a lift off you and ranting against the tyranny of cars. See Kate Aldridge in the Archers for a good example.
Sampurna Chattarji
Word or phrase: “Awesome”
Why? Because it has, through over-use, lost even the remotest ability to evoke a sense of being overwhelmed by genuine wonder. In India, every urban westernised teenager says “awesome” (with an American accent) so often, and so idiotically, it has become yet another banal synonym for “cool”.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Word or phrase: “The sky is the limit”
Why? It is one of those phrases that gets on my nerves. Whoever came up with that phrase either lacked imagination or had no spark of curiosity in their bosom. Why not go beyond the sky? That is why there is too much mediocrity in the world: we don’t want to know more than we ought to know. As a young boy growing up in a dusty township in Harare, I used to lie down, facing up to the sky, believing the Queen and her people lived somewhere beyond the African sky. I was right. I had the guts to believe, to imagine, to see, when so many in the world are conditioned to be content with the misery of their mediocrity.
lab4free 