08-14-2020, 05:03 AM
Just an idea on the distinction. In "Slaughterhouse Five," Vonnegut uses a cliche ("so it goes") repeatedly, every time someone dies. Then, out of the blue, as he's describing the firestorm at Dresden, he baldly states how many hundreds of thousands were killed then and inserts the cliche without further comment. The effect is devastating: all of a sudden we're not playing fatuous sci-fi games any more.
So... a lot of cliche vs. idiom is context. Thoughtlessness makes cliche; usage makes idiom. And so it goes?
Caesar probably said "the die is cast" a couple of times during every evening's game of high-stakes knucklebones. Then he crossed the Rubicon, and turned it from an idiom to a cliche? Or vice versa?
So... a lot of cliche vs. idiom is context. Thoughtlessness makes cliche; usage makes idiom. And so it goes?
Caesar probably said "the die is cast" a couple of times during every evening's game of high-stakes knucklebones. Then he crossed the Rubicon, and turned it from an idiom to a cliche? Or vice versa?
Non-practicing atheist