I am in search of the earliest/oldest cliche to ever enter literature.
would you say Canterbury Tales/Geoffrey Chaucer denotes very early cliches?
I am in search of the earliest/oldest cliche to ever enter literature.
would you say Canterbury Tales/Geoffrey Chaucer denotes very early cliches?
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Kind of a tough call. What's a cliche now wasn't when it was first written. Also, how do you handle works in translation? A line may have been translated into an English cliche that wasn't one in its original language.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Good point however I was wondering whether cliches finds their root in Latin since the word is French.
Could we simply say it is firstly found in Latin/Italian work and then crept up and found a way into English?
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
"Why me?"
Probably best to begin with Egyptian literature
Well, because it drasticaly pre-dates Greek and Roman literature, and Greek and Roman literature drew upon egyptian literature. So if you are looking at the original source.
Ofcourse egyptian lit was in turn influenced by lit of other cultures from the fertile crescent, but most if not all of that is lost to us.
Do the Egyptians have anything older than the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh?
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Well, there you're talking about the word "cliche", not the object. A cliche, according to Merriam-Webster, is:
1: a trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it
2: a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation
3: something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace
M-W also gives the origin of the word thus:
French, literally, printer's stereotype, from past participle of clicher to stereotype, of imitative origin
First Known Use: 1892
So the word's pretty new, but the cavemen probably had cliches in their speech after a time.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
That is one single work, the very notion of identyfying cliche stems from that fact that you have multiple works to compare. With only one work, there can be no such thing as cliche.
That is why I said egypt, because we have various literary works surviving from an entire civilization to compare wit each other and identify cliche.
I thought that would have been rather obvious...
Last edited by cacian; 04-30-2012 at 04:23 AM.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
I guess the question should be, what is the earliest instance of a phrase or theme in a work of literature which we would NOW consider cliche. I haven't read Gilgamesh, so I don't know. There's evidence (in art, like pottery) to suggest that many of the myths which we've found in ancient texts have existed for years before the Epic of Gilgamesh was written down, but there's no way to tell if the particulars of those myths have remained unchanged, so maybe we should count those out.
The oldest might be "the strong dominate the weak," that's apparent even from the artwork alone.
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 04-29-2012 at 07:17 AM.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 04-29-2012 at 08:26 AM.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi