Buzz factor

Annoyed by catch phrases? Chill out

"PERHAPS YOU ROLL your eyes when your co-worker complains that he 'doesn't have the bandwidth' to finish a certain task," wrote William Weir in the Hartford Courant last week. "But if history is any indication, you'll eventually be using that phrase yourself."

Weir is noting, rightly, that it's hard to resist the lingo our social group - friends, family, or co-workers - adopts as its own. And that's not all bad, suggests Weir; for instance, "'Think outside the box' actually has some panache to it. The problem is that the 20th time you hear it, the panache wears thin. And nothing undermines a phrase denoting originality more than the fact that it's a cliche."

Twenty times around the block and a phrase turns into a cliche, like Cinderella's coach reverting to pumpkinhood at the stroke of midnight? Weir's edict reminded me of another meditation on catch phrases, by Ron Rosenbaum, published in Slate last summer. Rosenbaum traces the stages of a phrase's life from novelty to currency to obsolescence - "when the user acknowledges a phrase's over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes" - and then to death (and, sometimes, a zombielike afterlife).

He doesn't estimate the length of this lifespan, but, like Weir, Rosenbaum lets us know that he can tell when a catch phrase turns to cliche. "Not so much" is OK: "It still works for me if used skillfully." "It is what it is," not so much: "One wants to say, using a monosyllabic catchphrase that is a particular favorite of mine and deserves its longevity: 'Duh.' "

Both writers make some good points. But why do they - and pretty much everyone writing about slang or jargon or catch phrases - feel obligated to pronounce on which particular usages, in their considered judgment, are past their prime?

Ben Yagoda took the same route, four years ago, in an essay on the influx of British slang that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Readers might not know when an expression had lost its mojo, but Yagoda did. "Sell-by date," for instance, had been used metaphorically eight times in the New York Times during 2003. "I would say that qualifies it as a cliche, and a fairly pretentious one at that," he ruled.

Lake Superior State University, in Michigan, has been hating on popular phrases for 30 years, publishing an annual list of words and phrases that deserve eternal banishment. (Voted off the island this year: "back in the day," "emotional," and "perfect storm.") And according to E.B. White in "The Elements of Style," the words "dude," "ripoff," and "funky" were dead and gone in 1977.

It's not that expressions don't get old and go out of fashion. Slang and catch phrases are the shooting stars and comets of the language firmament, shining brighter and moving faster than the (relatively) fixed stars of usage. But like any other feature of language, they come and go according to our collective will, not a ruling from on high.

So the rush to declare phrases obsolete looks like a sign of insecurity, as if the commenters are competing to beat one another to the punch: Who'll be first to say that "under the bus" is, like, so over, and thus show he's ahead of the pack?

This might make sense if there were some uber-professor of English handing out rewards for perspicacity. But the fact is, how long you use any given expression will depend on the company you keep, not the opinions of language pundits. If your friends still like to say "don't go there," or for that matter "23 skiddoo," who's to say no?

Sure, an individual writer might rely too heavily on cliches and formulas - or the wrong cliches and formulas - and might need editorial help. But in your speech community, what you, plural, choose to say is what goes.

Here's how one online commenter explained it, in a discussion of regional slang: "It truly depends on what kind of people you hang out with. If your a cool hipster who loves blocparty/strokes/smiths and goes to shows and lives at your friends coffee house you use quirky outdated slang. If your a '909 bro' you use . . . curse words along with 'bro'. If your a skater/heshe[r]/tight pants while wearing oldschool hiphop vintage kicks you use gangsta/quirky/fresh slang." Anyone in Southern California knows this, concludes Ugli Cali Kid - "unless your like 35."

And if you're "like 35," why would you worry about your cool quotient? Most of us like some catch phrases and avoid others, and we should just relax and enjoy our favorites, with or without the ironic distance of air quotes. Nobody gets to decide unilaterally which expressions are old hat, over the hill, on their last legs, jumping the shark, or beyond the pale.