Listening to Clichés and Individual Words1

Words are highly coloured and clichés are like patches of scarlet, the careless expenditure of which may irritate the eye.

You are invited this evening to surrender to the mere glow of words and phrases, a relaxing that will surely be the opposite to the usual call on our attention whereby we want to separate words, in the interest of abstract meaning, from the voluminous bodies that surround them. The words that denote ideas, and thus the ideas, are not only magnetized by particular associations but tend to bring physical being in their train. The word 'idea' means an image, is derived from the Greek 'to see': but for once we shall be encouraged to embrace an expression such as the one of 'entertaining a rough idea'. Also art conveys meaning of every kind in grossly sensuous terms: one of my points will be that art is an inevitable extension of the role of language, inevitable because instinct will suffer only a partial divorce from sensuous expression. Words bear witness.

Let the verb 'to express' provide a starting-point. The basic sense is 'to squeeze out': hence the facile and pompous clichés: 'to express concern', 'to express appreciation'. We would not speak as a rule of expressing love. When we want to express concern or appreciation we may not wish to imply that concern or consideration has to be squeezed out of us. Nevertheless that is what we say, probably because it is what in part we feel. It seems to me that those who readily—no, inevitably—employ some such ready-made yet equivocal expression, are showing their insensitiveness to words because what I can only call a static supply of ambivalent feeling compels it. Of course I am not implying that the true meaning of 'to express' should always be to the fore; but I am wondering why the cliché that employs the word is 'to express concern' though not 'to express love'. A supplementary explanation might point to euphony and to the emphasis that euphony or other arrangements of sound contrive.