Clichés become clichés because they do what they do rather
well. There isn’t anything else quite like a bull in a china shop. Nothing
could be nastier than having a ton of bricks fall on you. Putting a spanner in
the works probably works better than throwing a wooden clog into the machinery
--- that act which gave us the word sabotage, form the French word “sabot”.
Plots and stories can be clichéd too, yet it is good for our
psychological health to consume the same story over and over. Christopher
Booker, anyway, tells us there are only seven stories, Arthur Frank offers us
three and Robert McKee provides a template that will structure any story. Part
of our enjoyment of stories comes from recognising this pattern over and over.
Language, too, has to repeat so that we understand it.
