The express train from 96th Street downtown was running late this morning, and as I crammed into a car, I thought I’d work out a brief but non-cliché phrase to describe of the situation. Clichés may be easy, but they’re lazy; there are so many words to choose from, why settle for the most common combinations? I often find myself making up word games like this to pass the time. Neither Shortz nor Sudoku satisfy me; Boggle and Scrabble aside, most of my word and logic games are played in my mind.
My first free-association on that subway car was that we were packed in like sardines. (It’s good to cleanse the system first by flushing out the obvious ones.)
Then I thought peas in a pod was a humorous choice because it’s also a cliché, but one used to describe friendly proximity. Is a cliché no longer a cliché when it’s used against type? Or it is too knowingly ironic? Maybe a qualifier is needed to signal that it’s a switchup: angry peas in a pod is pretty funny.
How about candy in a piñata, which covers the buffets and jostle of a crowded subway car? Mud wasps in a hive? I like bowling pins in a sack. That sounds appropriately uncomfortable, if you’re a bowling pin. But is a subway car too little like a sack? Inside either, it can be dim and disorienting, I suppose. Maybe gravel in a can, or something else in a hard container. Although I think that “can” and “capsule” have been used before to describe the cylindrical metal subway car before, as in “an air conditioned can hurtling underground.” I’m long off the subway and still wondering who we were and how we were smooshed into that car. It’s the name of my game, playing parlor tricks with words.
A related hobby of mine is to collect fresh phrases I happen across, or as Emerson put it, to “select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph.”
My collection spans the past 10 years or so in a small clothbound journal. At first I thought I was merely compiling quotations, but much of what I have qualifies as a phrasal thesaurus.
There are marvelous turns of words. In a poem mourning a dead friend, Pablo Neruda could have written, “He was a great guy. I miss him and the fun times we had together.” But what he ended up writing was, “His smile was my bread.”
I have many others from lesser known writers, on things as mundane as spilt gasoline (“the fractal stain petroleum leaves in water”), the surface of an old painting (“web of fine capillary-like cracks”), a pet resting (“a cat pours his body on the floor like water”).
Then there’s Carl Sagan, who once asked his readers to imagine the universe as an unbaked raisin cake. “Worse analogies have been made,” he hastened to add.
The war on cliché: it’s what writing is about.