Gaffertape: the war on cliche
The English language is one of the richest in the world: 2,000 years in the making, 500 years since print made it accessible to the masses. The language of Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, Nabokov (insert your own favourite here).
If you were provided with such a gift from birth, free of charge, without the need for laborious lessons in language schools,
would you really want to waste it on lazy cliches, slovenly prose and inadequate expression? Would you really want other people to put (inferior) words in your mouth? Wouldn’t you want to protect and cherish this gift (at least as much as your new car), make the most of a tool, a means of communication though which you will persuade, seduce, argue, teach, voice your deepest thoughts, articulate your most intense feelings from the joy of humour to the sadness of grief throughout your life from birth to love to death? Why wouldn’t you always be searching for the best words in the best order?
Of course, the answer is so obvious.. How we speak dictates how we think. So, in an attempt to clean out the gunge and free up the mind, we have introduced the Gold Standard to inspire the simple use of good, clear English and the Black List to delete and destroy the lazy and the slovenly in our own war on cliche.
Help build our site by adding to these lists.
