Q: Is a Cliche as Rose by any other Name?
In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.
Most such phrases were originally striking, but they lost their force through overuse. In this connection, David Mason and John Frederick Nims cite the particularly harsh judgment of Salvador Dalí: “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”