Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s jab lands because it treats literary piety the way a bored aristocrat treats etiquette: useful for signaling, silly as a moral crusade. Putting cliches alongside table manners demotes both from sacred rules to social technologies. They exist to keep things moving, to spare everyone the exhausting work of reinventing a greeting or a sentence every time we open our mouths.

The intent is partly defensive and partly cruelly observant. Waugh wrote in a culture obsessed with “proper” forms, where taste functioned like a passport. He’s pointing out that the people most scandalized by cliches are often performing refinement, not protecting meaning. To be “oversensitive” is to treat a breach as a personal affront, as if the wrong fork or the wrong phrase threatens the entire order of civilization. That exaggeration is the joke: the stakes are never that high, yet whole classes are built on pretending they are.

The subtext is classic Waugh: contempt for sanctimony, impatience with fashionable anxieties, and a clear-eyed view of how language and manners both serve as class markers. Cliches, like manners, can be deadening when they become automatic; they can also be merciful, a shared script that prevents constant social friction. Waugh isn’t celebrating lazy writing so much as mocking the idea that purity is a virtue in itself. The sharper implication: the real offense isn’t the cliche, it’s the insecurity that needs to police it.