"It is my practice at this hour to read some improving book..."

I grew up in a house full of books. Jeeves would not have found all of them improving, but for a young writer many of the books definitely were: Strunk and White's Elements of Style, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (an edition that included his essay "Politics and the English Language" as an afterword), among others.

Most books about writing, old or new, advise writers to avoid cliches. But which ones? Language evolves rapidly, and the cliches of today may be the colorless, utilitarian phrases of tomorrow--or they may end up being no more than archaic oddities, with their meanings largely obscure.

Orwell (in 1946) advises us to dispense with these phrases: 

Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed.

Fowler's (the 1965 edition) goes into far greater detail, and in some ways it's more fun to read, because of its retention of material from the 1920s and earlier. Fowler's breaks down what we loosely think of as cliches into a variety of categories, including battered ornaments, cliches, hackneyed phrases, popularized technicalities, vogue words, and worn-out humor. These are my favorites of the hackneyed phrases--avoid them:

Balm in Gilead. / Blushing honors thick upon him. / Clerk of the weather. / Cups that cheer but not inebriate. / Curate's egg. / Defects of his qualities. / Free gratis and for nothing. / Inner man. / Leave severely alone. / Neither fish flesh nor good red herring. / Observed of all observers. / Speed the parting guest. / Withers are unwrung.

Are you feeling virtuous? I am. I'm certain that I've never used any of these phrases. In fact, I don't know what all of them mean; I've had to look them up. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable traces the origin of curate's egg to a cartoon in Punch magazine (now sadly defunct): 

Right Reverend Host. "I’m afraid you’ve got a bad Egg, Mr. Jones!"
The Curate. "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellect!"

Saying something is like a curate's egg is damning it with faint praise--oops, that's another cliche.

Here's the opening to the entry on battered ornaments:

...such synonyms of the elegant-variation kind as alma mater, daughter of Eve, gentle sex, and Emerald Isle; such metonymies as the buskin or cothurnus and the sock for tragedy and comedy; such jocular archaisms as consumedly and vastly; such foreign scraps as dolce far niente, hoi polloi and cui bono?; such old phrases as in durance vile and suffer a sea-change; such adaptable frames as where _____s most do congregate and on _____ intent; and such quotations, customarily said with a wink or written instead of one, as Tell it not in Gath or own the soft impeachment.

Returning to Orwell's observation, perhaps the only thing worse than writing prose full of cliches is getting an outworn phrase or underlying metaphor wrong. This is easier than we might think, even for the masters. E. B. White's famous introduction to The Elements of Style includes this:

To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me...

My dear Mr. White!

Which cliches of today would you most like to see tossed into the dustbin of history? (Damn, these cliches keep popping up like daisies, I mean wildflowers, no, wait, mushrooms.)  I'd nominate jumping the shark, being thrown under the bus, and (for local color) OS is just like high school.

Image credit: A curate's egg.