"So avoid clichés."

Freshening Up the Language: Better Than Great

By Richard Nordquist, About.com GuideJune 1, 2011

"Good writing is fresh and surprising," the handbooks like to tell us. "So avoid clichés." Then, unsurprisingly, they illustrate the point with a dozen musty expressions and move on to the next topic.

Not much help, is it?

The challenge of reupholstering worn-out language is nothing new. In 1900 B.C. (or thereabouts), the Egyptian scribe Khakheperresenb expressed this plaintive wish:
Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken. 

Or as T.S. Eliot said in "Little Gidding," "For last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice."

In his new book, Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives, Arthur Plotnik doesn't claim to have found the cure for clichés. What he has come up with are some alternatives--roughly 6,000 mind-foozling, wit-sharpening, Googleliciously cool alternatives--to such "stale superlatives" as awesome, unbelievable, fabulous, and great.

It's a fun book.

Though narrower in scope than Plotnik's witty style guide, Spunk and Bite (2005), Better Than Great is still more entertaining and informative than any book of lists has a right to be. Is it bone-brilliant, droolworthy, ripsniptious, splendidious, or stark-staring marvelous? I don't think so--but then precise definitions of these mojo-powered modifiers haven't been provided.

If you're in the business of composing encomia (a critic, copy writer, sales rep, or sonneteer, for instance), Better Than Great should prove to be a handy reference work. For the rest of us, it's an occasion to enjoy what Plotnik has called "the wallop of the new."

And if nothing else, compared to your handbook's method of combating clichés, Better Than Great is a hoggishly pleasurable gumbo.


Image: Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives by Arthur Plotnik (Viva Editions, 2011)

A review copy of Better Than Great was provided by the publisher. Please see the About.com  


 Source: http://grammar.about.com/b/2011/06/01/freshening-up-the-language-a-larky-review-of-better-than-great.htm