7 Modern Cliches to Leave Out of Your Graduation Speech

You hear them all the time, those annoying words that pass through the culture like a virus.

Last century's groovy becomes this one's awesome, sick, righteous, rad. Bad becomes good becomes bad again.

In the course of the first hour of my day today I've heard the word awesome five times, as an adjective, an adverb and a verb. And here I thought that one had gotten thrown out with last Christmas's fruit cake.

Here are some of my unfaves:

Drill Down: Maybe corporate types think this makes them sound like they are out working on an oil rig? It means...you know what it means, look deeper into the topic. You cannot go to a start-up meeting without hearing it five times until it drills through your ear drums.

Current theory is that the term has been adopted by corporate Democrats in response to Sarah Palin's old campaign motto: "Drill baby, drill." It should be retired to Arizona, like Palin.

It's the perfect storm: If author Sebastion Junger got a nickel for every time someone has overused this title of his 1997 book and 2000 movie, he'd have a perfect storm of a bank account. Not everytime something goes wrong is it the perfect storm. Sometimes, it's a damn hurricane.

This is low-hanging fruit:  Heard lately at every city council meeting or business meeting, but not at agricultural ones. It means an easy goal and one can only wonder who said it first, since no one who uses it has ever picked fruit of any kind. They have gardeners. And why is no one ambitious enough to go for the high-hanging fruit anymore? 

Elephant in the Room/400 Pound Gorilla /400-800 Pound Elephant/Gorilla in the Room: You can barely escape this description of an obvious problem everyone is missing in some tortured form during any business or political meeting.

Turns out, according to Wikipedia, Mark Twain had a hand in creating the elephant in an 1882 story called "The Stolen White Elephant," about detectives trying to find an elephant right there in front of them (there's a joke about blind men doing the same, right?)

The Gorilla is another creature entirely and varies in weight from 200, 400, 800 to 1,000 pounds, depending on the level of the economy's inflation and recession. (No source on this. I made it up.)

The expression refers to a big problem to surmount, like a pitcher facing Barry Bonds right after his steroid shots.

Fly under the radar/Stealth mode: A generation raised on Star Wars, X-Men and the Avengers, can't help but slip into the first World War expression because using the cloak of invisibility sounds too Harry Potter.  Business people think they sound like studs when they use military cliches.

7 Things You Should Know: This has become a journalism cliche like those 22 mile-an-hour speed limit signs. They call your attention to something you might usually ignore. And for some reason, making lists attracts readers, like awards shows attract TV viewers. They don't mean a thing, but you can't resist seeing why they stopped the list there.

And, if you check, they usually get the numbers wrong.


Please add your favorite unfaves and least awesome cliches in the comments below.