Cliches

As a writer you're told endlessly not to use cliches. They're tired, stale, hey show that you've not been thinking about what you're saying. The difficulty is though, peoplle came up with the phrases in the first place because they contain a truth. Something that's easily recognisable. And the greater the truth they encapsulate the more often they're going to get used and thus the more likely they're going to turn into cliches.

You know, like the old cliches about drunks in Eastern Europe. Lazy scaremongering of course.

Well, sorta:

Ukrainian Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko was detained by police at Frankfurt airport and prevented from boarding his flight because of drunken and disorderly conduct, police said Wednesday.

See? That's the problem with cliches, you cn't use them because they've been repeated so often but the reason they're repeated so often is because they encapsulate a truth.