If you are going to go there

Cliches are with us for a reason.  They are a nearly universally recognizable way for us to express ourselves in a sort of cultural short-hand.  If a group of people are sitting in a business meeting, and someone says, "this is where the rubber meets the road," the other meeting participants might roll their eyes and gag a little, but everyone around the table knows the speaker means that it is time for the people responsible for the project to be serious about taking action.  Why don't we just say, "it is time for us to take action"?  I can't answer that question.  I think we have a strange area in the Flocculonodular lobe of our brains (yeah, I found that on Wiki) that insists we speak in tired metaphors, and hope that somehow other people will think that indicates we are both smart and worldly.

So, if you can't avoid the cliches, which seem to be environmentally partial to business meetings, dashed-off emails, and personal conversations, at least educate yourself about where they come from and what they mean.  I am going to list a few of my favorites here.  War time seems to be particularly fruitful for the ubiquitous phrase.  I am also going to talk a little about some cliches that seem to have wandered hazily away from their origins.  (This paragraph, for those of you who write, is called foreshadowing.  It is a useful tool for letting people who may be distracted know what you are going to write or speak about before you actually do.)

Snafu--a marvelous and ubiquitous word that appears to have originated somewhere in the European theater during WWII.  Of course, because linguists love to argue about things, that theory is still in debate, but for our purposes it is good enough.  I think there is little disagreement that it is an acronym for "situation normal: all fucked up."  Though it originally seems to have been used to describe horrific messes, it has evolved into a much gentler little word.  It can now curtsy into the room to announce that IT had a snafu with the virtual meeting software, and everybody should get another cup of coffee.  It's a wonderful word with a respectable reputation and a very shady past.  My kind of word.  Fubar didn't fare so well.  I like it, but it still comes from the wrong side of the tracks.  If some one tells me something is fubar, I know that it's a jacked-up mess that is fucked up beyond all recognition.

The whole nine yards--the theories on this one are as plentiful as the theorists.  Who knows where it came from, and what the original reference was?  Apparently no one.  But I like the military theory.  Giving someone the whole nine yards meant feeding all of your ammunition through your machine gun when firing at an enemy.  So I don't go the whole nine yards unless I am deadly serious.

Toe the line--Ummmm.  Just don't ever write "tow the line."  Please.  There is lots of speculation about where the phrase originated, but none of it involves anyone dragging anything anywhere.  It means lining up precisely with something, be it your fellow soldiers, your political brethren, or company policy.

I guess I'll stop here, because the list is endless, but the attention-spans of my ADHD readers are not.  I may have already jumped the shark here, gotten myself into a pickle, scraped the bottom of the barrel, and crossed over the line...