Has anyone recently praised your culinary skills or your sartorial elegance? Have you spotted scantily clad females performing to serried ranks of spectators? If so, I hope nobody wrote it down. Phrases like these are almost always meant to be semi-humorous; when they were first used, they were probably more interesting than the alternative, and maybe they showed that someone had a wide vocabulary and could use it creatively. Now they are little more than clichés. They are what the Oxford Library of English Usage calls POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR.
The OLEU is a guide to good writing – very old-fashioned in places but with plenty of pithy and still-relevant advice. The classic example they offer of this sort of phrase is ‘terminological inexactitude’ – dishonesty. It attributes the first use of this phrase to Winston Churchill in 1906.
I associate phrases like this with a person not used to speaking in public, or writing a report, and who is therefore wandering along the spectrum between humour and pomposity, finding it easier to use these stock phrases – which certain situations seem to demand – than to think up their own.
The OLEU breaks this tendency into a few other categories, such as HACKNEYED PHRASES: all beliefs are ‘cherished’; all ignorance is ‘blissful’; all isolation is ‘splendid’; IRRELEVANT ALLUSION, such as ‘method in his madness’ which often just means there is a method; WORN-OUT HUMOUR such as ‘tender mercies’; and BATTERED ORNAMENTS such as ‘Emerald Isle’.
Most of us probably have a mental list of phrases like this – we call them clichés when others use them; we may not notice it when we are guilty ourselves. A few of my pet examples are:
– A team was ‘unceremoniously dumped’ out of a tournament – this phrase gets used regardless of the nature of the defeat.
– ‘I told him in no uncertain terms…’ might mean you avoided uncertainty; but it is just as likely to indicate anger and/or disagreement, rather than actual clarity.
– ‘The rest, as they say, is history’ saves me coming up with a more relevant ending to an anecdote.
So what does the OLEU advise? It suggests (in gendered language more forgivable at the time of writing) that when these phrases suggest themselves to the writer’s mind, ‘he should take warning…that what he is writing is bad stuff…Let him see to the substance of his cake instead of decorating it with sugarplums.’
I leave it to you to decide whether this last phrase is, itself, some sort of sugarplum.
Accuracy Works 