It's The Clichés That Cause The Trouble

Today, I worked at Atron for 8 hours--my mom's workplace--for the entire shift on the skinning machine (no, it doesn't flay things, just laminates products). When I have to spend the best part of close to eight hours standing in the same zone, doing the same mechanical motions, I tend to shift into autopilot and think about ideas, books I've read lately. Evidently I was thinking about clichés, after all, because I pondered if McLuhan had written about clichés being a waste by-product of modern Gutenburg print culture. It occurred to me as I was working that print culture is wont to cement, or fix words in place. Or perhaps it's a by-product of the thesaurus. Either way, an unfortunate side effect, or misunderstanding created by this technology is people are shaped to see one definition of a word or phrase as fixed, immobile or cemented in place--denotations which are often amiss or wrong--hence a cliché. Or, errors are more wont to spread in print, because everyone gives print authority over the oral word. Either way, people take things too literally, mis- or over-use it (too literally) to the point that a word becomes blunt, trite or an axiom. It looses its symoblic, metaphorical, allegorical meaning. Or, an erroneous use of a word or phrase takes hold of people's brains who don't know any better. Or a word becomes a fad, blunted to ugliness in such a short time like musical pop tarts.

Truly, I'm curious what others think, such as Dr. J, and other well-informed readers. It's an interesting theory, I don't think anyone's written a full-fledged book on the emergence of the cliché, right?