Cliché rehabilitation programme

“His/her blood ran cold.”

Now there’s a cliché. How many bad or lazy writers have written that to describe their hero or heroine getting spooked? Awful, isn’t it? If I opened a book and read a cliché like that, I’d drop it [like a hot potato].

But wait a moment. Read it again.

His blood ran cold.

Here’s a familiar scene. You’re in the shower, enjoying the lovely hot drubbing from the water, breathing in the steam, working shampoo into your hair. Possibly singing. It’s hard to imagine being more content. Then, disaster. No, not Norman Bates with his knife, but perhaps the next worst thing. Some clown elsewhere in the house decides to do the washing up. They turn on the hot water tap. And up in the bathroom, your lovely bounteous cascade of warmth and comfort turns stone cold. In the space of a second you’re covered in goosebumps, your happiness turns to horror, your singing tails off in a yelp. And there’s shampoo in your eyes, which you now can’t wash out. It’s hard to imagine being more miserable. And all because your shower has run cold.

Now.

Imagine if that was your blood.

You can see why ‘His blood ran cold’ was first used. Properly imagined, it is a monstrously effective image. The danger with clichés is that they are just parachuted in, without proper thought. But the best ones still have power, so long as you really take the time to consider the spirit in which they are meant. Who do you think first invented the (now clichéd) ‘Cool as a cucumber’? None other than P. G. Wodehouse.

Perhaps there should be a united effort to rehabilitate those clichés that still have something to say. They have become blunt through over-use, but, as ‘His blood ran cold’ shows, many were once razor sharp tools of emotional surgery.