Don't throw the meaning out with the bathwater

Everyone loves a cliché. You can complain and protest all you want, but at the end of the day, you’d just be one of millions purporting to hate them — which is really just a cliché of an attitude, if you’ll pardon the light-hearted dig. (We’re not laughing at you; we’re laughing with you.)

There’s a lot to love about clichés, not least of which is the fact that most are quite creative. No wonder they get used and loved to death.

Take, for example, “raining cats and dogs.” That’s just a fun image, even if its origins should be taken with a grain of salt. A common explanation is that in “olden” times cats, dogs and other animals would hide out in the thatch and hay of housetops, only to come sliding down when the rain loosened it, but it is more likely that heavy rain would have washed unfortunate deceased strays down the streets. I have my tail between my legs for ever repeating the false one.

And you have to admit: The first time you were told to shoot for the moon — to at least land among the stars — it was a poetic bit of inspiration.

From a sociological — or perhaps psychological? Sociolinguistic? — perspective, however, clichés are pretty illuminating, if you read between the lines. I recently heard two people discussing the meaning behind another evocative cliché: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This one, too, is almost certainly not literal. Wolfgang Mieder in 1992 recorded the earliest usage of the phrase in a piece of German satire in the early 16th century. Historic parenting may not have been perfect, but probably did not involve dumping babies off the back stoop.

They were talking about how the crux of the message was about not giving up on something great because of one related aspect you don’t like. While that’s not far off from my own understanding, these two seemed to relate it more to “canceling” someone or something.

What they didn’t touch on at all was the common implication of a mistake. The baby isn’t purposely dumped by association with the bathwater. Rather, medieval (err, Renaissance) Momma is too hurried to look carefully at the filthy grey film to see the baby’s still in it. Talk about a diamond in the rough, though.

If we can take online fora and language-loving blogs as a sample portion of the wider population, the focus of interpretation seems mixed between the two, and there’s likely a few other perceptions straggling along.

If we put meaning aside, use tells us a lot, too. Unless you use it often yourself, how long has it been since you’ve been cautioned to take something “with a grain of salt?” Since learning the phrase in middle school Latin class, I think I’ve encountered it twice — in books at least 20 years old. Nowadays, we seem to stick to clearer, blunter cousins like “inaccurate,” “poorly researched” and “fake.” If it doesn’t make a comeback soon, I’d say it’s in danger of becoming archaic, but only time will tell.

At the end of the day, clichés are worthy of a little more appreciation than your English teachers begged for (though in their defense, they just wanted you to give it 110% and get more bang for your buck).

In the meantime, I’ll try not to cry over spilled milk, since every cloud has a silver lining (and since the cat will lap up the mess anyway). For it’s better to have loved and lost …