Hey, Americans ...

[blamebrampton]

Do you ever use forms of cliché other than plain old cliché? Such as clichéd or clichés? I see it used in a manner that I would consider wrong so often that I am wondering if it is one of those wacky idioms that English develops up all around the world. Or it could just be young people today with their emo music and Twittering ...

Comments

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

Isn't "clichés" an acceptable plural for "cliché"? If not, it should. :)

As for clichéd, I find the word quite ugly, with that unpronouncable 'éd' at the end. Actuall, I'm not quite sure why one could not use 'cliché' as an adjective. I would have thought that a "cliché story" would be understandable by all, as is "love story" or "horror story". But then again, that possibility of using substantives as adjectives is on of the most puzzling features of the English language, at least for French native speakers.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Yes, both s and d endings are quite right and are standardised in non-American English usage. American usage seems to allow for the d at least to be left off. The pronunciations in Britglish, AusEnglish and KiwiEnglish all allow for the d quite easily, more so that US English according to my bad fake Yankee accent test.

And from the English English perspective, we do standardise many of the words we appropriate, we like to make them feel at home in the language ;-)

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

It seems that, as many others, I had understood your post the wrong way. I thought that you had problems with clichés or clichéd, not that you missed them dearly for being ignored by ignorant Americans. :)

Wouldn't "phony" be an acceptable replacement for clichéd? I always thought they were synonyms. In French, clichés would be translated as "téléphoné", which is a literal translation of "phony".

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

In English, clichéd is closest to hackneyed: a phrase that may or may not be true and accurate, but, regardless of its integral worth, has been so over-used as to be rendered meaningless and trite.

Phony is only useful for things that are in some way fake, alas, since it is often a very good synonym for the clichés that fall into that category.