Life Kinks: Cliche

Recently a (now former) co-worker of mine let fly with the old bromide, "Great minds think alike," as we both washed our hands after using the restroom. While I imagine the comment would have carried with it a different weight had the situation been different (like say if we spontaneously began washing each other's hands), in context it was, regrettably, a cliche. I found myself sort of furious afterwards, moreso than usual, and I realized there was no good response. After thinking about it a bit more, I think it's because there actually is no good response to any cliche, which is ultimately what makes them so horrible.

If you're the kind of person who isn't into confrontation, and somebody mutters "One in the hand is worth two in the bush," you either force out a chuckle while restraining a vomit (which, by the way, is a superb display of precise muscular control if you can pull it off - if not, it's awkward but appropriate), or simply nod your head in assent. The only other option is say nothing, or go off on some sanctimonious tirade about the stupidity of cliches (and nobody wants to hear about that). And then, once attaining your consent that, yes, in fact the ancients were right, one in the hand is worth two in the bush, the other person walks off feeling all superior and smart (if they're one of those assholes who really believes that cliches mean anything) while you sit there slack-jawed. Or you vomit on them.

Unfortunately, this also grants cliches an unseemly and cheap rhetorical power - suddenly the debate is reconfigured into the cliche's terms and you have to argue your way out of a pre-fab "universal truth," or at least something that is true in the way that things that don't die are considered true simply because they're alive, which is to say they are self-evident in the most irreducible way - I see them and unless you want to get into some kind of pseudo-phenomenological debate about perception or Matrixy "How do you know this isn't the dream?" bullshit, they're real. What I'm trying to say is that cliches have not only lost the kind of specialness that comes with originality, wit, creativity, & c., but that they've also lost, in a strange paradox that you may or may not believe, despite they're being, at base, metaphors, and therefore always in the realm of abstraction, too concrete for language and devoid of that multi-valent translucence that makes words and strings of words special and good. Which I guess is why I've always sort of bristled at them (while sometimes trying to ironize them): they're like the crusty old neocons of language, which is reason enough to stick your finger down your throat.