Commentary: No need, as they say, to avoid cliches like the plague

Every good author knows not to use cliches.

But I love cliches. I think in cliches, talk in cliches and write in cliches.

In fact, 18 years ago, I wrote a personal ad using only cliches, hoping it would show my sense of humor.

Before I share it, I must preface by saying that I’m not an egomaniac, but I was informed by a seasoned single friend that if you didn’t “toot your own horn,” the reader would not go beyond the first line.

So, it went something like this:

“I am fit as a fiddle, sharp as a tack, smart as a whip and pretty as a picture. If you are a man who is worth your salt, has your heart in the right place, knows how to kick up your heels, then maybe we are two peas in a pod. Contact me and we’ll let the chips fall where they may!”

Wow! I had three responses in under an hour.

“When it rains, it pours.”

Guy #1, immediately “laid his cards out on the table.” He said that even though he “worked his fingers to the bone,” he “lost his shirt” when the market “took a plunge.” He suggested that if we meet, we go “Dutch treat.” I said that I’ll get back to him.

Guy # 2, appeared, at first, to be a “straight shooter.” But then he spent the next 45 minutes trying to convince me that he was “a diamond in the rough.” He sounded like a “broken record,” and really “got under my skin.” He never asked me anything more about myself. “What am I, chopped liver?”

“Last, but not least”, Guy # 3. He seemed a “little rough around the edges,” with a “chip on his shoulder.” Just too “full of himself.” Definitely “high maintenance!”

I never met any of them, and put my search “on pause.” I was “at my wit’s end.”

As a “glutton for punishment,” I wrote another ad about a month later.

But this time, I found a man “after my own heart”. He was the “best thing since sliced bread.”

We’re still together, and “I’m as happy as a clam.”

“Live and learn!”

TERRI GOLDSTEIN lives in Newport Beach.