Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Along with these vital virtues come pernicious defects. Bergman's work is often pretentious, obscure, and riddled with private references. He has the courage to use clichés, and often they work beautifully-witness the white-faced, black-cloaked figure of Death in The Seventh Seal. But at other times, particularly in his comedies, the clichés are the devices of a back-country Ernst Lubitsch; in A Lesson in Love, the last-minute, sappily symbolic entrance of a small boy dressed as Cupid is pure Kitsch...
...providing the unimportant answer to this unimportant question, Novelist Hawley shows that he has refined his prose technique since Executive Suite and Cash McCall; the tedium of his narrative's implacable forward progress is now unrelieved by any fresh thought or phrase, or even by a friendly old cliché. The business world is a valid and fascinating locale for fiction, and Lincoln Lord spouting ghostwritten eloquence is a recognizable type. But in telling his story without really analyzing him, Hawley does no better than his hero: he just keeps that handsome jaw moving...
...Manhattan's Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, and illustrated by New Yorker Cartoonist Charles Saxon, the coupons joked about everything from Early American furniture to the late-commuting American male, appealed to the strong self-improvement drive of housewives, neatly parodied some of Mrs. Suburbia's best-known clichès. Samples: "Seldom during the day do I talk to anyone over three feet tall. This little world I live in is no place for someone over 21. Since I am over 21 (slightly), send Times." "People think my husband's brilliant. Nobody thinks I'm brilliant...
This lurid episode may be a cliché of a thousand Sunday supplement stories about the "white slave" trade, but it actually happened innumerable times in the vociferously moralistic setting of Victorian England. The nature, extent and eventual destruction of the white slave trade in England are described in detail in this modest monograph by a British novelist, Charles (The Neon Rainbow) Terrot. Between mild beige covers, in mild beige prose, he has told a story that makes the ghastliest passages of Dickens read like a parish calendar...
Author Edith de Born, fiftyish, is herself Viennese, lives in Belgium as the wife of a French banker. She writes in a rather stiff English that never conveys the cozy, weary sloppiness of Viennese upper-class slang. And many cliches of her adopted language apparently still strike her as fresh; too often her characters "champ at the bit" or find troubles weighing on them "like a millstone." To Author de Born's credit, her characterization is not nearly so cliché-ridden as her language. The sad pleasures of between-wars Vienna, the long afternoons of penurious idleness...