Cliches: I Do Not Think They Mean What Moths Think They Mean

Book Cover I really, really dislike clichés. I dislike them a LOT. And it's not just in writing that I dislike them. I hate when I'm talking to someone and suddenly a chain of corporate speak comes out of their mouth. Sometimes, I overhear people on business conference calls on the train and it's ridiculous, between the touching base, the face-to-face, the circling back, and (my favorite) the calenderize-ing.

Yes. Calendarize.

In romance, there isn't so much calendarizing (though I think if anyone did calendarize something, it would be a villain, or someone rather hapless) but there is no shortage of cliche.

Recently I came across “she drew him like a moth to a flame,” and I may have pulled a lateral rectus muscle rolling my eyes. First, moth to a flame? Really? That's the best language we have?

Second, why a moth being drawn to a flame? If we're describing the hero, which we are, that implies he has no choice in the matter and is drawn to the heroine by some instinctive and reflexive attraction that ultimately will be bad for his mortal state (he's going to get burned to a crisp, right? It IS a flame). That language calls to mind the idea that the hero's attraction to the heroine is predetermined (by moth brains, apparently) and he has little power to choose someone or anyone else, while she has to accept that predetermined attraction as well – and also try not to burn his short hairs, what with all the flaming. Moveover, as the Phrase Finder says, being the moth hero (note: this is not a request for shifter moths, please) means that the hero is a moth, and “moth was used the the 17th century to mean someone who was apt to be tempted by something that would lead to their downfall.”

OMG. FLAMING VAGINA DENTATA people. Watch out! Oh, those pesky heroines with their powerful female wiles, attracting men so they might destroy them.

Sigh.

And third, moths aren't actually attracted to the flame, as some scientists on NPR explained. They're confused by it.

They're trying to either hide from predators that come out at daybreak, or trying to use the moon as navigation and end up distracted by all our porch lights – similar, as the NPR host says, to beach turtles who look for the moon to head back to sea, and head for your patio instead.

So if you unpack that moth/flame cliche, the hero is irrevocably attracted to the heroine, she's dangerous and will contribute to his downfall, AND she's a false signal, a modern, technological replacement for the natural light of the moon. The figure posing as the flame, so often the heroine when this cliche is employed, is in reality a false heroine, and, if used correctly, the language would probably indicate that the temptress is about to be revealed and circumnavigated by the hero due to the stronger, more natural and wholesome pull of the real heroine's full moon.

Heh.

I find cliches so tiresome because they are lazy, and sometimes, when you examine them closely, the words don't do what the writer thought they were trying to do. The cliche might end up undermining the original intention, which was to say that the hero was powerfully attracted to the heroine, perhaps despite his own intentions. You'd think I'd love that, since I'm a known fan of 'I don't want to like you, I don't want to like you, I can't stop thinking about your hair, DAMMIT' conflict. But I am not drawn to cliches like a moth to a flame. If anything, I'm repelled by them, like a wise insect from the bug zapper.

What cliches do you hate? Which phrases do you wish you didn't see in romances so often?

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Ranty McRant

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  1. “Curvy”.  I hate that word, and it appears in every flippin’ romance I read now, regardless of sub-genre.  Do they mean fat, or do they mean normal/thin with big tits and a pneumatic butt?

    In any case it always seems to me that the heroines referred to as “curvy” end up barely filling a B cup…

  2. joanne says:

    I’m in the middle of the 12th book in a mystery series by Deborah Crombie.  I would have passed right by – and totally forgiven & forgotten – the phrase ‘moth to a flame’  if not for your post this morning.  Ack.

    Since there are more books to come in the series I’m blaming you Sarah instead of the author.
    Now I feel better.

    @Darlynne:  Deer in the headlights. LOL! Much worse then the moth.

  3. Olivia Waite says:

    If we’re starting a clubhouse for the Inexorables, I call dibs on the tower windowseat and the chenille throw. That may be my favorite romance-novel word of all time, despite it’s admitted frequency.

  4. Olivia Waite says:

    There is a great passage at the beginning of Dickens’ Christmas Carol where the narrator says Marley was dead as a door-nail—and then goes on a tangent asking why door-nails are deader than, say, coffin-nails. Then he gives in and says quite ironically that it must be true if people keep saying it, because “the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.” So sneaky, the knife in that sentence!

    This kind of thing is why I feel the Muppet version of A Christmas Carol was the most accurate possible adaptation.

  5. Oh I hate that too! As a fat woman if I’m reading about a character that’s suppose to be overweight I’d actually like to see the word “fat” used! Not curvy, diva, goddess, etc. Just plain old every day fat. I don’t like it when people call me the other names.

    And yes on the B-cup crap too. B-cup does not “curvy” make. Call me when she’s at least a D cup. Or a triple-D like poor old aching me!

  6. Perhaps Dickens didn’t do his research? The “door nail” is the flat metal part of a door knocker. (Don’t ask me why it’s called that.) Because the knocker part hits that flat part, it’s “dead” because it’s been hit so darn much.

  7. the phrase that i hate is “teachable moment”.  It is used way too often in places it isn’t needed.  I saw it on television the other day and I couldn’t believe that some writer somewhere thought it was a good idea to include it in the script.

  8. I think I read that in high school!  It just weirded me out, though, despite the language.

  9. it sounds like they want to bring something to the front i.e. make it the focal point, but it just sounds so odd.

  10. Darlynne says:

    This isn’t a cliche, it is more often spoken than read, but hey, that won’t stop me from ranting about my all-time-hated word and what’s Monday for if not ranting? I mean, have you seen the lines at the post office today?

    “Guys,” as in “you guys.”

    I realize we English speakers struggle with the absence of an acceptable plural form of “you,” and that when addressing a table of customers, a group of people or the room at large, we fumble for something more all-encompassing than “you.” Sadly, while every other language in the world appears to offer the necessary conversational tools for these situations, we are stuck with “you.”

    I am here to declaim that “you guys” is not now nor will it ever be the plural of “you.” That “you,” all by itself, works in both singular and plural address. There is no need for more, there is nothing wrong with asking, “Can I get you anything else?” or “Are you ready to order?” to any size group or gathering; everyone knows they are included in the question. Exceptions may be made for regional variations of “y’all” and “all y’all,” but that’s it.

    This little space right here? This is my “you guys”-free zone.

  11. Kim says:

    I was watching a television show and one of the characters kept saying “AKA” over and over. She had for or five in a row. It was embarrassing and I just wanted her to shut up aka close her trap.

  12. kinseyholley says:

    My corporate-speak pet peeve is “reach out.” “Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.” “I’ll reach out to you in a couple of weeks…” It’s a combination of therapy-speak and corporate-speak and it just grates.

    I don’t mind cliches so much if they aren’t overused. If they’re popping up on every page, it’s usually an indication that it’s a badly written book and so I wouldn’t be finishing it anyway. My big hangup is what I call the narrative tic – if an author uses the same phrasing or the same rhetorical device over and over. The most recent example I can think of is the last BDB book before last – John Matthew’s book. All her characters’ internal monologues are becoming indistinguishable, and they all started with “And wasn’t it just like ____ to ____” or “And wouldn’t you know it, no matter how….” or “And didn’t it just figure that so and so would so and so.”  Drove me nucking futs. (Didn’t make me stop reading, because I’m an addict.)

    I’m probably guilty of cliched phrasing but my bigger weakness is an overuse of certain words. My SIL complained that in one of my books, every character called every other character “baby” every other page and damn, she was right.

  13. Janine Allen says:

    I had a boss once who used to ask me if I had any “bandwidth,” meaning time to get something accomplished. Every time I would answer, “No, I don’t. I’m not a computer.” Good thing he had a sense of humor.

  14. Kirsten says:

    That is one of my favorite books by her. I read it aloud to my husband and all we have to do even now, 12 years later, is mention the name of the book, and we start laughing.

  15. Miranda Neville says:

    I can no longer stand “lave”, a word I’ve only ever seen in romances. Real People Don’t Lave. On the other hand, I quite enjoy it when it’s misused at lathe. “He lathed her nipple.” Ouch.

  16. A cliche I hate in films is the clumsy/klutzy heroine.
    It’s supposed to be movie shorthand for ‘adorable’ but it makes me want to throw things at the screen and send an angry email to the director.

    ehem.

    As opposed to a whole phrase or cliche, the word I keep seeing – which makes me stop reading for a moment and wonder ‘did they really need that there’ is ‘literally’.

    It feels as if the author isn’t sure she’s made her point, so she’ll have a sentence like ‘she fell at his feet’ and then throw in ‘literally.’

    arrrghghghghghggh!

  17. DreadPirateRachel says:

    Add me to the list of “It is what it is” haters. I hear that, and it makes my eye twitch. It is the epitome of meaninglessness. Why not just say, “It exists.” It means the same thing!

  18. Stef says:

    The most annoying cliche to me is not so much a phrase as a descriptive device.  I am so tired of heroes with muscles of steel or heroes without “an ounce of fat” anywhere on their bodies.  Why can’t there be some lean, normal-sized heroes for once?  Or at least a better way to describe his physical perfection.

    Also, clumsy heroines (as mentioned by Ebony McKenna).  That was/is one of the annoying things about the Pink Carnation series, Eloise is such a klutz/directionally challenged I have no idea how she functions in life.  Most women do not grab a glass of champagne and then instantly spill it all over themselves like a fool in front of a crush.  Capable heroines are so much cooler and identifiable than extremely klutzy ones (at least to me).

    Lastly, inexorable is in a lot of romance novels, haha.  I am going to notice it all the time now.

  19. cleo says:

    I’m not sure this is a cliche, but last night I read about a couple “swirling into the same vortex of wanting” and it made me laugh so hard my husband asked me to read it out loud.  The rest of the book was quite good – but that vortex of wanting swirled me right out of the story.

    I’m sure I’ve read other swirling, stormy, eye of the hurricane, vortex-y type descriptions of lust.  Not sure it’s common enough to be a cliche, but it’s a weird metaphor (and it always whooshes me out of the story, with gale force winds).

  20. JuJuBee says:

    Toujours gai, Darlene, toujours gai!

  21. Lynnd says:

    The corporate-speak terms that annoy me the most are “dialoguing” and “utilizing”.  What the heck is wrong with just talking and using?

    As for romance cliches, it’s the heroes who are named Demon, Lucifer etc. that annoy me. 

  22. Emily says:

    None of these cliches particularly bother me, but I enjoy reading the rants.  Physical clutziness doesn’t bother me, mainly because I have known a lot of clutzy people. I also enjoy many of the cliches.
    Also “it is what it is” is not the same as “it exists” at least not to me. An Example is: Let’s say you’re turning a paper to a teacher or a professor. You see a small typo but decide you don’t have time to fix it and you hand it in. “It is what it is.” It nots saying the paper exists: it saying the paper exists in this form (usually imperfect) as opposed to a perfected form which could also exist. Its way of acknowledging things could have turned out better but now you’re going to move on and accept the thing it whatever form its in. Anyway the cliche doesn’t bother me particularly. I think its a way of accepting the little things that go wrong which some people have harder time with than others.
    Anyway I can’t think of any verbal cliches that annoy me. Grammar yes, cliches no. Maybe plot cliches, (like my brother fights for my honor)?

  23. Oooh, I’ve never going to read the nipple suckin’ bits without wincing now..

  24. If it was a good enough motto for Mehitabel, it’s good enough for us!

  25. Ezreader says:

    I really hate the phrase a certain author uses in every book: “she was so beautiful it hurt to look at her”. Gawd!!!!! I want to gouge my eyes out when I see it. A close second is the sexytimes love noises which the heroine hears and is startled to realize its coming from herself. GIVE ME A BREAK. No real woman would ever do that. Sheesh!  Too many authors are guilty of that one.

  26. You guys, Google Ads is asking me if I would like to look at some wood lathes.  NO I WOULD NOT.

  27. Melissa Bradley says:

    I hate “she was female to his male…” Then carry on with how perfectly the hero and heroine fit together because she is so soft and he is so hard.  I gag every time I see this phrase in a romance

  28. kinseyholley says:

    “I realize we English speakers struggle with the absence of an acceptable plural form of “you”…

    Hence the word y’all. It always bugs me when non-Southern types ridicule “y’all” as a hick word, but it perfectly addresses the second person plural problem. What bugs me even more is when a character in a book or movie addresses a single person as y’all. It may have been used in the second person singular in the past but I really don’t think anyone uses it that way today.

    lathed vs. lave…ay yi yi.

  29. Rei says:

    THANK YOU. I absolutely hate it. Yeah, okay, we get it, he’s a dude and she’s a lady (I almost typed those the other way around, which I’m actually pretty sure would make for an interesting romance) – STOP. Stop beating us over the head with it. I want to know why they’re attracted to one another as people, not because he’s so manly and she’s so womanly and they need to come together in a glorious union – a melding, one might say, of yin and yang – a masculine-feminine love soup. Yeesh.

  30. persnickety says:

    I’ve been having a Mary Balogh re-reading fest for the last few days so “her(or his) laughed at him(her)” is starting to grate.

    on the plural you- I believe that you used to be the plural/formal one and thee/thou was the more informal singular in English (yes, we really had one and we jettisoned it).  I struggle to reconcile this with the many religious references, as would one really address one’s god informally?  Or maybe it is meant to imply singularity.  Too much french and spanish at the wrong age, clearly. Or english used the plural and singular you’s in a mnner completely differnent to the oher latinate languages.

    What irks me is the use of “you” in a procedure where it should be a pronoun to symbolise the protagonist, but english no longer has an appropriate common usage one.  One is only allowed to use one if one sounds appropriately posh british.  Otherwise it just sounds wanky.

  31. Unimaginative says:

    “He shut her up by the simple expedient of kissing her”, or something to that effect.  Kissing is always a simple expedient.  Bleh.

  32. PamG says:

    “It is what it is” annoys me not because it is a cliche, or a pointless variant on “it exists,” but rather because of the way I’ve heard it used.  One could address oneself thus in order to express one’s acceptance of Things As They Are, but I’ve usually heard it used to address others and shut them down.  It comes across as a veiled way of telling someone to quit whining and of minimizing another person’s problems.

    And another thing….  When did problems become such a dirty word that all we have are issues and concerns?

    Oh yeah, one more….  “Branding” makes me want to hurl.  Heat up them irons, boys; my ass needs a corporate logo.

  33. Joanna S. says:

    I agree with Snarkhunter about having vagina-as-fist icks.  I mean, really, my vagina does not “grip,” nor does it curl its fingers towards its palm, cock (heh.) its arm back, and deliver an well deserved right cross to the hero’s jaw.  My vagina can do many things (even for love!), but it can’t do that.

  34. kkw says:

    Flaubert’s dictionary of received ideas is hilarious, but it sometimes also makes me sad because all the same cliches are still being used well over a hundred years later.
    Lave bothers me because if he’s cleaning her, well, that strongly implies she’s dirty.  Not like sexy kinky dirty, but lacking in hygiene.
    Which reminds me: nauseous. Fortunately this rarely comes up (sorry) in romance novels, but this used to mean something that makes you want to throw up, and I know that it’s now considered synonymous with nauseated but I still really dislike being asked if I’m nauseous.
    I wonder at what point we will just give up and declare that literally now means figuratively.
    It’s the inaccuracy that irritates me, not the lack of originality, with the whole moth/ flame issue.  I’ll take a familiar metaphor over a jarringly bad one any day.  Quivering like blanc-mange, or any similarly gelatinous variant, is better than that whole shimmying like two armadillos doing a slow dance under a silk scarf bit.

  35. SB Sarah says:

    There is nothing better than two armadillos doing a slow dance, or just doing the dance as old as time. You know, while you dialogue.

  36. Wren Andre says:

    In business I vomit to the sounds of “cutting edge” and “think outside of the box”. They are most definitely not cutting edge anymore, and they make me want to crawl back into the box. In romance, overly abundant references to heat, burning, flame, etc, in reference to passion. I’m sure one can’t get away from them 100%, but limiting it would make the writing seem less lazy!

  37. As an artists I would rather be blind for the rest of my life than hear, ” The duality-of-man. ” used in any fashion ever again.

  38. kinseyholley says:

    Ok, I thought of a sex scene cliche that I hate: the tweaking of the nipples. Nipple tweaking is painful. Every time a guy has tried to tweak my nipples, he got slapped because that shit hurts. Do I use my teeth on your johnson? No. So don’t twist my nipples, dumbass.

    [Scurries off to see if she ever used nipple tweaking in her own books.]

    [Son of a bitch. I did. “slowly circling, tweaking and teasing.” I hate myself right now.]

    And I confess to feeling some sympathy for authors who fall back on cliches, and it’s not just because I know I’ve done it myself. It’s because we don’t want our narrative to be flat, just “he went here and did that” and “He was very hot. Like, really, really hot.” Myself, I can write dialog till the cows come home – I love writing dialogue and it comes easily to me – in fact, I think up my stories in terms of dialogue. Narrative is just the boring bits I have to stick in between the dialogue to show what’s happening, and sometimes in striving to make it lively, interesting, snappy, descriptive, I find myself falling back on cliches without even really realizing it. And also, if you’ve been reading romance for 30 years, you’ve internalized a lot of it, and by now some of those cliches are like technical specifications. I know, this sounds like an excuse, and it is. But it’s also a reason.

    Sigh. Now I have to go see if I’ve ever described a vagina in terms of how well it accommodated a dick. I tell you one thing – no womb has ever clinched, nor been poked or bumped or rubbed, in any of my sex scenes.

  39. Sybylla says:

    One of my romance-novel peeves is “male nipples” or even “flat male nipples.”  There are a couple of current authors who seem to use those descriptions in every single book they write, and I chuff with exasperation every time I read them.  You know what?  We’re mammals.  We’ve *all* got nipples.  I’m not going to suddenly get confused about the hero’s gender (or wonder if he’s going to start lactating) if you eliminate the adjective.

  40. Don’t worry too much about the tweaking nipples in your own books, Kinsey. Some women like having their nipples tweaked to varying degrees. I assure you, some woman read that part and got really hot just on the thought of getting tweaked.

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