Body of Work

If you want to understand how nauseating a trite expression can be, just listen to sports people evaluating their own teams if coaches or teams and players if analysts. It will not be long before you run into "body of work," the most nauseating trite expression I have encountered in my life, easily eclipsing "think outside the box," which, at least, deals with a not easily expressed concept. Something like "You need to take a fresh look at this" doesn't convey what "think outside the box" does. Something like "I advise you to abandon your preconceived views when approaching such-and-such" comes much closer. Another possibility might be, "I advise you to abandon conventional wisdom when considering this problem." The problem with this last is that it contains a trite expression itself.

Some may wonder (I did) whether I should be calling these things cliches. Well, I entered "cliche" in the little box at the upper right corner of Mozilla Firefox and used the Merriam dictionary search engine for an answer and got "a trite phrase or expression" and "a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation." I popped in "trite" and got "hackneyed or boring from much use : not fresh or original." In short, there is little difference between the two terms though I would say that "cliche" fits better than "trite" for "thinking outside the box" while the reverse seems more applicable to "body of work."

What does a sports person mean by a "team's body of work"? Usually he or she means just the record of the team -- whom they beat and by how much and who beat them and by how much. That's all. In this case, we have people who have discovered that they can seem quite bright (at least to themselves and their peers, who also talk this way) if they use this phrase. It is like "at the end of the day," which is another trite expression/cliche that helps to make you seem smart, or once did, I think. It is also used by sports people. It replaces, more or less, "in the last analysis." Their might be better paraphrases for this.

I recall always being confused by accounts of the concepts "trite" and "cliche" by my literature and writing teachers. Obviously, they wanted their charges to use fresh expressions or, more reasonably, characterize something familiar in a fresh way. In the back of my mind, I tended to see their objection to the use of trite expressions by the common person (namely undergraduates) as snobbish. I had fun telling fellow students, whom I deemed snobbish, that practically everything Shakespeare wrote is trite. They would, of course, look at me as if I were mad, and they were, of course, close to being right. Hey, if you aren't a bit of a mad man you have little chance of avoiding hackneyed ways of expressing oneself.

My fellow students once their astonishment passed would defend Shakespeare by saying that when he wrote things like "All the world's a stage..." and all the other great lines they weren't trite at the time. I pointed out that that made no difference since we who were reading Shakespeare were being required to read copious amounts of trite material. I have always liked being a bit mean to snobs though, if truth be told, I am a bit of a snob myself but about different things usually. The reality is, when it comes to reading Shakespeare, these "trite" expressions are very comforting. One knows one is in the presence of genius.

I have used "think outside of the box" on occasion when too tired to talk or write outside the box. Saying this reminds me of another very tiresome expresion, "walk the talk." There is nothing wrong with the concept of course. It is just a tiresome expression. The main reason to avoid cliches/trite expressions is that if you do there is a chance that what one says will be original or at least not beaten to death by others.