Oxford University Press Clichés We Live By: From Modernity to AI

clichés We Live By shows how clichés - 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 clichés, 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 clichés as events in time, defined less by objective repetition than by a subjective impression of triteness. Like déjà vus, clichés evoke a visceral sense of "here we go again," 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 clichés and AI language models, highlighting their shared characteristics as statistical, collective, and curiously ownerless forms of language. AI simultaneously relies on and challenges clichés, raising questions about the boundaries of human and machine-generated banality and originality. Far from being trivial, clichés emerge here as dynamic cultural forces we inevitably live by.