WORD OF THE DAY: HACKNEYED

WORD OF THE DAY: HACKNEYED

adjective | HAK-need

What It Means

Something is considered hackneyed when it is not interesting, funny, etc., because of being used too often; in other words, it’s neither fresh nor original.

// The new crime drama’s characters are shallow stereotypes who engage one another in hackneyed dialogue.

Examples of HACKNEYED

“Any positive lesson here is lost in all the hackneyed jokes, and by the end the movie falls apart entirely.” — Tim Grierson, Vulture, 4 May 2024

Did You Know?

In his 1926 tome A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, lexicographer H. W. Fowler offers a good deal of advice under the heading “Hackneyed Phrases.” While some of the phrases he cautions against (“too funny for words,” “my better half”) will be familiar to most readers today, others (such as “hinc illae lacrimae”) have mostly fallen into obscurity. Fowler was not the first usage writer to warn against the overuse of hackneyed (that is, trite or clichéd) phrases; a number of authors in the late 19th and early 20th century had similarly (hackneyed phrase alert) taken up the cudgels against trite and banal turns of phrase. In 1897, for example, Frederic Lawrence Knowles advised against using “agitate the tintinnabulatory,” and in 1917 Margaret Ashmun and Gerhard Lomer discouraged “the dreamy mazes of the waltz.” Were these hackneyed phrases so objected to that they became obsolete? This is unlikely, as the same manuals which object to long-dead expressions also object to “blushing bride,” “bated breath,” and “one fell swoop,” all of which have survived. Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that phrases come and go with time. This is, in a way, a pleasant explanation, for it means that the seemingly ubiquitous phrase you detest stands a fair chance of, ahem, falling by the wayside. Only time will tell, as they say.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary