阅读理解
The term “cliché” usually applied to a phrase -- "he was as hard as nails" you say of some tough character, or you might describe your heroine as having a "flawless oval face". This too is a cliche. It conjures up a picture, and the picture is what you want it to be, but by using a cliche --a phrase which has been done to death over the years, since it is so very apt -- you are making your writing trite, unoriginal and flat. When a cliche is born, it is such a wonderful phrase, so right, so apt, so perfect, that it immediately passes into common usage. The reason why Shakespeare is, according to some people who do not appreciate his works, difficult to read and boring is because it''s full of cliches.
Every line in Hamlet, for instance, contains some phrases that will ring with ominous (恶兆的)familiarity in your ears. "Frailty, thy name is woman!" will make your readers squirm (扭动的、蠕动) every time you trot it out, as will "The lady doth protest too much, me thinks" or "I must be cruel, only to be kind." If you are the sort of person who refers in everyday conversation to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" or comments darkly that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark," you might well be wondering why people start to run the other way when they see you coming.
Readers will do the same thing if they are faced with writing which is full of cliches. Yet as Thomas Carlyle put it: "The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor."
When each cliche was born -- the very first time it was written or spoken--it was such a gem that society seized on it as absolutely the only way to express the thought it conveyed. Everyone else immediately began to use this wonderful phrase each time they wanted to express the same thought. And so it passed into common usage, the everyday speech of ordinary people. And since it was used so often in the years that followed it became worn, threadbare, predictable, boring.
A cliche is a form of words which saves you from having to use your own brain to think what you want to say. If you were going to describe a character "as hard as nails", you might have to spend some time if you decided to avoid this phrase and employ one of your own. What exactly does "as hard as nails" mean? That Fred was tough? No, not just tough, ruthless as well. He never gave any quarter, he was always on the defensive, he would give out as good as he got, and mere. Before you know where you are, your own description of Fred will have run to three pages, and still you cannot encapsulate the exact meaning of the phrase "as hard as nails". But by trying to avoid a well worn clich6, you have started your brain ticking over, and you will begin to come up -- perhaps tentatively at first-with original thoughts and phrases which bear your own hallmark.