Cliche Conundrum

This caught our attention today in the New York Times:

PIGS in blankets? “They’re back with a vengeance!” said Sean Driscoll, an owner of the silver-tray catering company Glorious Food in Manhattan. Though they never disappeared from the bar mitzvah circuit (where they are often called franks in jackets, the way Katz’s Delicatessen, being kosher, labels them), they had been disparaged as a cliché for too many years. The classiest caterers kept their distance

Now, of course, pigs in blankets are all the rage (though for some of us, they never lost their allure). The very idea that something can be a cliché, and then not, is more the puzzle for those of us who love language as much as we love pork products.

SPOGG has been researching clichés, and has been very interested to discover that the animosity toward familiar phrases is a relatively recent phenomenon. To that end, we've written a brief bit on them, which we will e-mail on Sunday to all who join SPOGG's mailing list. So if you have not yet joined, please do!