Next to the cash register at the company cafeteria where I work, a Word of the Week is posted on a small café chalkboard. The man who posts it is solely responsible for this and he's been doing it for almost as long as he's been working here. I've never asked him where he got the idea to do it, or how he chooses the words.
I always notice the word of the week, though, because I'm a writer and happen to like words, but I hadn't given much thought as to whether there was any rhyme or reason to the words themselves. Until lately.
At first, there were some random and interesting words, but over time I detected a pattern in the word selection. Here's a list of some that have appeared on the chalk board: perseverance, freedom, trust, hope, cooperation. Those are just a few. I wish I had been keeping a running list to give my observation greater weight. From my limited sample, what all the words have in common is a positive, value-laden quality. Never are the words strange, esoteric, humorous or difficult. It's always a word that is in such common usage that it has already become a cliche, but by extension so have the values these words uphold. In a way, each one is an example of the most succinct form of the sermon.
They are instructive in one way. They demonstrate how cliches work to weaken words, especially the more abstract ones. It is downright difficult to define freedom, or hope and what they represent to different people, because they immediately cry out for qualification even more than definition. At the same time, they are so freighted with cultural baggage we feel we are meant to know exactly what they mean and even more than this that we ought to possess their quality or shoulder their baggage of meaning.
I guess I noticed and began to resent the Word of the Week when I felt I was not being educated or even amused, but preached at. More insidious is the way the cliche, used here to assume a broadly held value and unquestionable aspiration, acts as a form of propaganda, a way of coercing us (perhaps without our even knowing it) into agreement. John Gardner warned against cliches in fiction because they reduced everything in life to a formula. But that formulaic thinking is itself a kind of coercion, telling us how we ought to see things, or what our expectations should be, whereas fresh language allows us to pause and see something anew, does not allow us to immediately translate a thought, action or description into a safe and familiar thing. Free thought, which takes more effort than most of us freedom-loving Americans imagine, can free words of the cliche as cultural propaganda. In the meantime, I'm guessing the next Word of the Week will be agreement.
