David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published June 28, 2005

The clichés are gnawing at my offspring

Having small children means we parents see the world through new eyes, but eventually even those new eyes begin to dull with nonsensical repetition. It's beginning to happen to my daughter, and she's only 4. It won't be very long until she's as numb as the rest of us.

Well, OK, it isn't as dramatic as all that, but something interesting is happening. She's discovering clichés.

After getting dressed one morning, she informed me that she was pretty as a picture. I paused. Pretty as a picture? I've heard it hundreds of times, but what does it mean? She thinks she looks pretty, but what does a picture have to do with her appearance?

So I went to the horse's mouth (another odd expression I can't explain) and asked her what it meant, and she didn't know anymore than I. "I'm pretty!" was all she could muster. Obviously it's a cliché she's heard from someone. A 4-year-old doesn't draft her own idioms. So even though she wasn't aware of why she was pretty as a picture, she decided to insert it into a conversation.

We all do this. It's not a bad thing, and it's not a good thing. It's a human thing. It unknowingly becomes habit. I do my best to avoid overused expressions. If my publisher is going to shell out good money for my column, I can at least attempt to combine words in new and interesting ways. After all, I'm a professional.

With my daughter sitting next to me looking pretty as a picture, I thought about other clichés that don't make much sense. Some of them are verbal while others are more conceptual. We all know what their intended meanings are, but when you look at them objectively and literally, they're quite irrational.

·I saw an old cartoon in which a boy opens his pants pocket and a moth flies out. We all know it means that the boy doesn't have any money, but why a moth? I'm sure rich people get moths in their clothes. In fact, I suspect rich people have more moths in their pockets than poor people. In general, a rich person has more clothes than a poor person. Regardless of your financial status, you can wear only so many articles of clothing at once, so it's reasonable to assume that rich people have lots of clothes at home hanging in closets and folded into dressers. That's where the moths get into our clothes, while we're not wearing them. Since a poor person must logically wear a particular pair of pants more frequently than a rich person, shouldn't the moths be flying out of rich people's pants? When a moth flies out of your pocket, you're loaded! I just invented a cliché!

·I've heard a person described as a barrel of laughs. I know what it's supposed to mean, but when I hear it I can't help but think about another cliché -- the poor guy who can't afford clothes and is forced to wear a barrel with suspenders. Perhaps the barrel of laughs cliché and the barrel-wearing cliché are derived from the same person. If I ever met a guy wearing a barrel, I'd laugh all night long. He would truly be, in a very literal sense of the words, a barrel of laughs.

·I've never understood why owls are thought to be wise. Is it because of their large eyes? If that's the criterion, Carol Channing is an undisputed genius.

·The day will come when I'll be forced to explain to my kids some of the gorier clichés in the American dialect. My heart bleeds for you, eat your heart out, nose to the grindstone, warms the cockles of my heart -- they're all pretty gross. I don't know what a cockle is. The first three definitions in my dinky desk dictionary are: a weedy plant, a bivalve mollusk, to become wrinkled. Almost as an afterthought, the fourth definition indicates that it's an idiom meaning one's innermost feelings. "So, you see Anna, there's this wrinkled mollusk living among the weeds in your heart ..."

·I've seen one person sleepwalking, a college roommate. He didn't have his arms straight out in front of him, so I presume he was doing it wrong. He stumbled into my room late one night thinking it was the bathroom. Luckily I pointed him in the right direction before he, uh, got down to business. Where did this notion of sleepwalking with your arms straight out come from? I bet it's something a Hollywood director made up back in the Silent Era -- he had to demonstrate a character sleepwalking, so he invented that silly arms thing. Maybe he was inspired by all those mummy movies. From what I know, sleepwalking and mummywalking are the same thing.

How am I supposed to explain mummywalking to a 4-year-old?

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.