Communication is the primary skill, and the primary limiting governer upon our life's achievement. And unfortunately, we're relying upon a technology as old as time itself as our primary means of dealing with it. It's lousy at multitasking, serial at best, buggy, devours precious primary memory resources, and prevents more rapid growth all around. It suffers from user errors, arcane rules, bad programming, and a very steep learning curve.

It's language.

The digital age is not primarily limited by computing horsepower, but by the constraints we place upon ourselves in attempting and needing to verbalize our ideas in a linear fashion. The human mind is capable of so much more.

How can we break the barriers presented by verbal and written language?

By ignoring our English teachers and embracing rather than snubbing the product of the natural evolution of communication, the cliche'.

Some may object that the usage of cliches is lazy; I say absolutely, and brilliantly so, like any evolution should be--just as our modern sans-serif letters are vastly simplified over Old English characters. Just as we have a standard alphabet that eventually came into play, and then standard words on top of that, cliche's are the next level of standard, simply trying to happen. They're standard image phrases, trying to form. And we keep knocking them down.

Cliche's allow the next level of phraseology to be developed. No professor would tell you to invent completely new words or use a brand new language to express yourself in journalism, so why are we so repulsed by cliches, which themselves are a purer form of the images that we think in than words anyways? They may bog us down into old and tired memes, but 'old and tired' can also be translated as 'successful enough to catch on and be useful.' Cliches allow for higher degrees of 'linguistic chunking,' enabling more complex thoughts to be developed and shared more efficiently, if imperfectly, and therefore transmits a broader scope of the entire vision than what would be normative if one were constantly searching for the exact word.

While not always defined in Webster's and not even so easily expressed, cliches have rather precise and intricate cultural definitions which are nearly universal across the common language.

Like the celebrated photomosaics which present works as pixelated collages of smaller images, cliches can serve to express combinations of concepts on a macroscopic level and linguistically compress the breadth and size of an abstract, complex subject into a viewable, thumbnail image.

So let's just go with the flow, I say.

The unanswered question is this: does the increased difficulty of expressing oneself in linguistic terms over pictoral images stimulate or repress our natural creative ability?

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