Complex Numbers

Crappily Ever After

I've been saying that every cliché started out as profound insight.

     Before They Were Cliches: On the Origins of 8 Worn Out Idioms  
Erin McCarthy and the Team at Mental Floss Examine Some Famous Phrases

While they call out Mental Floss, the above link is from LitHub.

Worn-out phrases can make a reader roll their eyes, or worse—give up on a book altogether.

"Roll their eyes" is itself a cliché.

Clichés are viewed as a sign of lazy writing, but they didn’t get to be that way overnight; many modern clichés read as fresh and evocative when they first appeared in print...

Which is what I've been trying to say.

But of course, many clichés are tired and worn-out, but they have to be used sometimes, or else how will people know when you subvert them or make a joke out of them?

Add Insult to Injury
The concept of adding insult to injury is at the heart of the fable “The Bald Man and the Fly.” In this story—which is alternately credited to the Greek fabulist Aesop or the Roman fabulist Phaedrus...

Look, if anything's that old and passed into cultural mythology, it's not a cliché; it's an allusion. Or just part of the language, like a word, only it's a phrase. Like "part and parcel" or "cease and desist." Though no one knew the origin of this phrase. Except us, now.

Albatross Around Your Neck
If you studied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in English class...

We skipped that one, and I still haven't read it, but I haven't seen this phrase used enough to consider it cliché. Also, it's an allusion, too.

Forever and a Day
This exaggerated way of saying “a really long time” would have been considered poetic in the sixteenth century.

My nitpicky mind always thinks "but when time runs out, we have no way of knowing the length of a day."

Happily Ever After
This cliché ending line to countless fairy tales originated with The Decameron, penned by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century.

Okay, look, no. Used at the end of a fairy tale, it's not a cliché; it's a formula, the flip side of opening it with "Once upon a time." Other languages use different formulae. You might as well claim that "amen" at the end of a prayer is a cliché.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford opens with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Oh, come ON. I thought this list was about overused phrases that were fresh and wondrous in the beginning, but this infamous story-opener was widely hailed as "bad" from the get-go. That's why it makes great comedy material.

There are a few more, but I'll be honest, here: Yesterday, I finally broke down and purchased Baldur's Gate 3. And I'm in a hurry to get back to gaming. So feel free to see for yourself; I don't have the same sort of commentary on the others, anyway.