The Cat's Pyjamas: The Penguin Book of Cliches

by Julia Cresswell

A fascinating, thematic exploration of clichés from as the actress said to the bishop to zero hour, explaining what they are and where they’ve come from. Julia Cresswell has taken her best-selling dictionary of clichés (‘Sumptuous… A mine of information.’ Guardian) back to the drawing board and has created a book, packed with famous (and infamous) quotations and memorable information, that will change the way you see English.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Reference

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[Adam Stevenson]

Wouldn’t you know it, but cliches are interesting.

They have fascinating tales to tell, preserve outdated forms of words and can change until they mean the exact opposite of what they originally meant. (For example, a ‘learning curve’ was originally a graph showing how people learn, so a steep learning curve would have shown someone learning something easily, not finding it difficult.)

It’s not a scholarly woke like a Jonathan Green slang dictionary, but it is an interesting collection of facts and stories related to a much overused and underloved mode of communication.

The only thing I was left wondering, is calling something a cliche, a cliche in itself?

[Christoph Weber]

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