Cliches

I heard a story on the radio today about clichés. The word comes from the time when type was set by hand. Typesetters began to find that there were certain phrases that were repeated time and again in story after story. Rather than set the type each time, they left these phrases in blocks and popped them in when needed. Actually, they did not pop them into the rest of the type; they “clicked” them in. Cliché is French for “click”.

After a while, those same phrases, though readily employed, began to lose their meaning. Rather than chose the right world to fit the idea, the typesetters used the familiar words (clichés) even if they were not perfect. Hence the modern meaning for cliché: an idea or expression deficient in originality, used or occurring so often as to have lost interest, freshness, or force.

The Rabbis of our tradition remind us time and again that we must never let our prayers, our faith, our lives, become cliché. We are not to walk through life routinely, but rather to bless each day for its unlimited potential. As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote in his Book of Words, “Blessings keep our awareness of life’s holy potential ever present. They awaken us to our own lives. Every blessing says, “I am grateful to be a creature and to remind myself and God that life is good.”