A cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before

And his column, ‘String Along with Reggie Okong’, soon became very popular indeed. No one pretended that he dispensed any spectacular insights, wisdom or originality but his ability to turn a phrase in a way to delight our ordinary readers was remarkable. He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before; and our ordinary reader clearly had not and so was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have produced when it was first coined. For Cliché is but pauperized Ecstasy. Think of the very first time someone got up and said: ‘We must not be lulled into a false sense of security.’ He must have got his audience humming. It was like that with Okong; he was a smash hit!

C. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), 10