Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...more than a century the study of ancient Greece has been thinning out in Europe and the U. S., becoming a luxury or a slightly silly passion, a rare specialty with scholars, a cliché or nothing to the people at large. Greek is hard to learn (though not much harder than German) and U. S. education has generally dispensed with it. Available translations are often out of date or poor and first-rate writers have had more pressing interests than to improve upon them. People who feel like studying mankind's past have been attracted to anthropology...
...their stride. Since there is nothing spectacularly bad about If I Were King, it will doubtless appear on every list of worthwhile films compiled by every self-appointed reviewing board in the U. S. But its makers have found not one fresh point of view, have included every available cliche of sword-&-cloak romance, plus the cliché of modern fiction, social significance. Result: so wooden that even the clashing of swords suggests a xylophone...
...PUBLIC PAPERS AND ADDRESSES OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT. 5 Vols.-Ran- dom House ($15). Dating from the New York Governorship to January 1937. with introductions and annotations, a total of 3,493 pages in all. A 14¼-pound shelf-filler, five trunkfuls of vigorous clichés, these handsome volumes have been widely hailed by critics as a successor to the monumental, unread papers of Woodrow Wilson...
...Henry Grew ("Harry") Crosby, New Directions professes a social purpose. Editor Laughlin believes with I. A. Richards and most other competent critics that language, like a swimming pool, needs to be constantly renewed and purified for the pleasure and health of those who use it. If stagnant associations and clichés can be broken up in people's minds they will be more imaginative and receptive to ideas of social change. Says Editor Laughlin: "It is the word worker who must show the way." Less subliminal than that of transition (see p. 68), his program emphasizes nimbleness, freshness...
...Maigret as the wife whose idea of an escapade is to ride around the block in a taxicab with a lover who can be with her only in dark motion picture houses; Hugh Herbert as the theatrical prompter who, when off duty, prompts from force of habit the conversational clichés of those around...