A note on the front fly leaf of this book suggests that this fascinating and illuminating (sic) guide, which, from an orthographic point of view, is thoroughly disheartening.
A note on the back fly informs that Ms Kirkpatrick is a writer and lexicographer. Editor of both the Bloomsbury Thesaurus and the latest edition of Roget's Thesaurus, she was formerly editor of Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary," which is plain scary.
Accurate spelling is a nice accomplishment, like playing the piano, or being good at pub quizzes, but bad spelling need not in the days of MicroSoft Word be an insurmountable handicap for anyone, even a lexicographer. A kind of boredom with language, on the other hand, should be taken as a sign to steer clear of writing dictionaries and lexicons. Betty Kirkpatrick's Cliche's exhibits such a saddening weariness with the whole business of communication, a torpid attitude to the task of unravelling the commonest units of language, that it immediately puts the enterprise in doubt. If the author is so little capable of distinguishing fresh writing from stale, how much faith can we have in her notions about cliche's?
It is not clear at any point why someone who does not appear to possess some affection, no matter how grudging, for the lexical sandwiches we pass around the English language, would want to embark upon a book such as this. "No dictionary of a living tongue," as Dr Johnson observed in the preface to his Dictionary, "ever can be perfect," but if this aspect of contingency does not quickly become the pleasure, if watching the train pass by, or contemplating the trail of a comet, is not the point of the exercise, then what remains?
In this case, the answer is, some very stodgy ingredients. Kirkpatrick's introduction strip mines the best of what Partridge and Fowler had to say on the subject of cliche's, hybridising their invention of a number of categories for these words. (For no, given reason, Kirkpatrick decides to rename the group of cliche's which Fowler calls "Siamese twins" phrases such as "kith and kin", "and safe and sound" "Doublet cliche's.) There then follows a series of brief notes on cliche's, some of which are mildly interesting, few of which possess any liveliness of approach, and none of which attest to exhaustive research.
The entry marked "nail in someone's coffin, a", concludes "In origin the phrase refers to the fact that a coffin was nailed down after the corpse was put in but before it was put in the grave." If one untangles the loopy prose, ignores the suggestion that the coffin rather than its lid was nailed down, skips over the screaming redundancy in offering a three step burial chronology, and the confusion around the subject of the final clause, it still seems as though the author has spent a very long time telling us that the phrase originates in the practice of nailing coffins.
With equal helpfulness, Kirkpatrick notes that "tip of the iceberg", the refers "to the fact that the bulk of the mass of an iceberg is below the surface of the water and so not visible".
Neither is Kirkpatrick any Noel Coward when it comes to exemplifying her cliches. An entry on "get the message (which, of course, makes no mention of Shannon and Weaver) offers what is probably intended as a helpful example of the expression's everyday use "It wasn't until she put in ear plugs that he got the message and realised how loudly he was snoring." Anyone who can get such a quiet, symbolic message while snoring so noisily deserves respect and attention, and not to end up in one of this volume's limp examples.
While Kirkpatrick may not be able to get to the root of the vogue cliche e.g. "the fast lane" her examples contain all the information a reader might need in assessing the target audience for this book "He couldn't take life in the fast lane, any more. He's left the city and gone to the country to write books," we discover, before being offered a second episode of this mini soap "She loves being in the fast lane. She got bored looking after the children." John Thaw is the obvious candidate for the role of "He", but the casting for "She" might prove more contentious.
Meanwhile back at the ranch (from "old silent Western films, where it was a familiar caption indicating that the action had switched to the ranch ...") things are hotting up in the Cliche household. Only two entries later, in an episode entitled "fate worse than death, a", Kirkpatrick kicks up the dirt with a relish that an entire expresso bar full of Eastenders writers could hardly hope to match. "He's asked you to stay the night at last. Oh, a fate worse than death Time spent with "She" would hardly be any better, indeed, "to have to listen to her talking all day would be a fate worse than death".
One cliche which has been omitted from the book is "old rope, money for". This is a pity, as Ms Kirkpatrick's ideas on this subject might have made engaging reading.