Cliches We Live By

cliches We Live By shows how cliches - those everyday phrases we love to hate - shape our world. It traces their trajectory from modernity to the contemporary digital and artificial intelligence eras, revealing their pervasive presence and their paradoxical nature as both banal and profound. The book historicizes the cliches situating its emergence in modern print culture, and offers the first comprehensive roadmap of theoretical perspectives, proposing an integrative approach. Drawing on philosophy of language and rhetoric, the authors treat cliches as events in time, defined less by objective repetition than by a subjective impression of triteness. Like deja vus, cliches evoke a visceral sense of "e;here we go again,"e; interpreted variably by users and receivers. Viewing them as negotiable constructs, the authors explore their manifestations in popular discourse and literary works: through self-conscious endorsement, repetitive hoarding, creative appropriation, and celebratory embrace. The book also examines the interplay between cliches and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges cliches, raising questions about the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. Far from being trivial, cliches emerge here as dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.