Life & Wisdom Quote by William Safire

Safire’s line is a clever little ambush: it tells you to stop using stale, prepackaged language by immediately using one. “Avoid cliches like the plague” is itself a cliche, and that’s the point. The joke isn’t just self-reference; it’s a diagnostic. If your ear doesn’t catch the built-in hypocrisy, you’re precisely the kind of writer Safire is warning you about.

The intent is disciplinarian, but not joyless. Safire spent years as a newspaper columnist and language scold with a showman’s instinct for teaching through bait-and-switch. He knows that exhortations about “fresh prose” are easy to nod along to and even easier to ignore. So he makes the lesson memorable by embedding the failure inside the instruction, forcing the reader to experience cliche as a kind of verbal autopilot. You can almost feel the sentence arrive before you choose it.

The subtext is that cliches aren’t merely boring; they’re evidence of unexamined thinking. They signal that the writer is reaching for consensus instead of precision, comfort instead of observation. “Last, but not least” doubles down on that critique: even our transitions can be rented, not owned.

Context matters here: late-20th-century American public writing was increasingly professionalized and templated, from politics to journalism to corporate speech. Safire’s jab is a defense of attention. If language is where thought shows up, cliche is what happens when thought doesn’t.