Common Expressions Quotes

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

The two things I hear wherever I go, literally walking down the street, through airports, or in restaurants - it is either 'You raised me,' or 'Fellow Canadian.' Not even a paraphrase - those are the exact remarks.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Don't avoid the cliches - they are cliches because they work!

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.

It's funny, people say 'Welcome back' when I haven't gone anywhere.

Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public.