In my editing work and in just reading the daily papers, again and again I run across gross, unfounded generalizations and exaggerations, especially in political statements, in advertisements, and on the opinion page of the newspaper. This all-too-human habit of making sweeping assertions reminds me of an anecdote that Ian Stewart relates in his book Concepts of Modern Mathematics. It goes like this:

An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician were traveling through Scotland by train. Spotting a lone, black woolly creature grazing in a pasture, the astronomer exclaimed: "Look! Scottish sheep are black."

"Tsk, tsk," clucked the physicist. "You mean to say, 'Some Scottish sheep are black.'"

The mathematician's eyes looked up to heaven as if to ask the Maker to have pity on his two foolish companions. He corrected them, saying, "In Scotland there exists at least one field in which there is at least one sheep at least one side of which is black."

I doubt that many of us would want to emulate our mathematician friend's exactitude, but most of us could use a modicum of his penchant for preciseness in using language. The English language and many other languages as well, including Korean, make it dangerously easy to generalize and force us to use a lot of "extra" words when we want to specify exactly what we mean. Out of habit or inarticulateless or just plain laziness, we all too often settle for a syllable-saving generalization (and usually hyperbolic, to boot) when something more realistic and to-the-point was what we had in mind.

Parents and even teachers mislead the young with such statements all the time. (Oops! I just did it myself three times in the last sentence. I should have said "some parents," "some teachers," and "sometimes.") How many times have you heard a parent (maybe your own) say something like "Don't say you can't. There's no such thing as can't. You can do anything if you try." I quickly saw through this one, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't turn into Plastic Man (the comic-book character who could transform himself into any shape he desired), I couldn't do completely realistic sound effects (including a full symphony orchestra) the way Gerald McBoingBoing did, and I couldn't get out of mowing the lawn.

Some parents and teachers (especially coaches) go a step further and turn it into a metaphysical pronouncement: "Nothing is impossible." I'll bet when our rail-riding mathematician was a kid he would have pointed out that this statement is self-contradictory. If "nothing is impossible" means "everything is possible," then it should be possible for there to be something that is impossible, which contradicts the original statement. Therefore, it can't be true that nothing is impossible.

Certain religions get themselves in trouble in a similar fashion, as when they claim that God is omnipotent. Omnipotence would be a great burden, even for Him, for He would have to be careful not to get annoyed at nitpicking mathematicians lest he do something rash, like making all integers prime or eliminating transcendental numbers, thereby pulling out the very underpinnings of the universe.

Advertisers are particularly fond of broad, bold strokes in their ad copy. (Hey, I know—I used to be a copywriter.) They tell you about their "constant" research and development and their "unforgiving" quality control to assure you get "zero defects" and "only the very best." Then farther down in the ad they tell you that they have a model to fit every budget (in other words, some of the models aren't as good as others), and they brag about how their repairmen are only a phone call away (in case anything goes wrong with their "zero defect" product).

Advertisers are in good company because shoppers who read their ads are just as guilty of sloppy "universalization." Listen in on this typical conversation between two window-shoppers at the mall.

Heather: Oh, Eloise, look at that dress! Isn't it just darling? I'd give anything to own that.

Eloise: Well, why don't you buy it? The price tag says it's only seventy-nine ninety-five, and you just got a fat bonus.

Heather: I couldn't spend any of that on clothes! I'm saving up for a trip to Hawaii.

Maybe what Heather really meant was that she'd give anything under $29.95 to own the dress.

People trying to be nice do it, too. "I wouldn't miss your party for anything, old buddy, but I've got a hot date that night."

Lovers do it: "I'll love you forever." "You're my everything." "I couldn't live without you."

Then they move in together or get married, and it turns into such argument-starters as "You never do anything around here" and "You're always nagging me." Just think how much discord could be avoided it they said what they really meant: "Sometimes you don't do your share of the housework." "It bothers me that you sometimes criticize me too much."

I think the whole world would be better off if everybody would stop generalizing and exaggerating all the time.

If your editor, English teacher, or mother tells you that cliches are bad, don't listen. I swear by them because I can personally testify to their usefulness. Just read anything I've ever written, and you'll see what I mean.

Anything worth saying is either a cliche already or will soon become one once the word gets around that someone has finally thought to say it. Speaking or writing creatively is a matter not so much of avoiding the use of cliches as of inventing fresh ones. But, for everyday purposes, the old standbys offer several advantages.

Cliches help us conserve energy. The brain consumes tremendous amounts of energy, but thanks to the wonderful cliche, the people of the world probably save enough thinking power each day to light a city the size of Seoul for a year. Imagine how enervating it would be if we had to think of something new to say every time we opened our mouths. But with the abundance of ready-made expressions built into the English language, we are able to chatter on for hours, operating our cerebra at minimal wattages.

We are also spared a great deal of wear and tear on thesauri and thumbs by the grace of the cliche. After discarding many a tattered and torn volume of Roget's, politicians, economists, and pornographers would find that they had run out of synonyms for "security measures," "subprime loan," and "throbbing."

Cliches just sound "right" somehow. They have a naturalness that wins out over the more forced sound of original expressions. Compare, for instance, "pale as a ghost" with "pale as an anemic honkie." To achieve originality, we are forced to be too specific and possibly even reveal some of our prejudices. Very few of us are ready to make that sort of commitment.

Hyperbolic cliches are a mainstay of the formulas of etiquette, where the unadorned truth simply does not work. The cliches do no harm. When the president of the company ends his speech with "We hope we shall have your ongoing encouragement and support," everybody knows he really means, "We hope you'll buy more of our products and invest in our stocks." And we can't tell someone we'll be "grateful for two hours and ten minutes" and expect to get any help, so we say "eternally grateful."

Let's face it: most of us are not very good at lying. If a fellow didn't have cliches to fall back on when he's a contestant on "Wheel of Fortune," for example, he would probably not be able to state truthfully, "I have a lovely wife and three wonderful children." No, he'd fumble for words and in his nervousness might even blurt out, "I'm married to an obese virago, and we have two teenage drug addicts and an 11-year-old antisocial nerd."

One's repertory of cliches tells a great deal about his personality. Psychologists base their word-association tests on this fact. You know how such tests work, don't you? The shrink may read off a list of words, and you're supposed to say the first thing that comes into your head. In group therapy or marriage counseling, the participants themselves may give the words to each other, continuing the chain of associations by turns. With a couple contemplating divorce, it might go something like this.

Husband: "My father."

Wife: "Belligerent."

Husband: "Army boots."

Wife: "Your mother."

I'm surprised that word associations aren't being put to more widespread use. In fact, it seems to me that by now someone should have developed a cliche quotient (CQ) test to supplement, or even supersede, IQ tests. A person's CQ would predict how well he or she would fit into a particular job. An applicant at an employment agency could be asked to give word associations on her application. One of the words might be "unrequited." If the applicant wrote "love," the agency would recommend her to a counseling service. If she wrote "transfers," she'd be a natural as a bank vice president. If she wrote "embolism" or "truffle," she'd be referred to a fruitcake factory.

There are many ways you can use cliche quotients to improve your life. Try word associations with your fiance—it may prove extremely revealing. But please don't bother to post a thank-you comment if it turns out you're incompatible.

The Korean marketing and advertising industry is suffering from a serious ailment I'll call anglicitis. This is the inexplicable compulsion to use English or quasi-English words and expressions in situations where they are unnecessary or even misleading. This disease is not just a Korean phenomenon. Epidemiologists haven't been able to figure out where it started, but it has already spread all over the world.

(I can't take credit for coining the term anglicitis, by the way. At first I thought I had made it up myself, but then I discovered it already in use on websites in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch languages.)

Here's an example of one of the symptoms of this plague. A neighborhood acquaintance of mine and I were sitting in a local eatery sharing some food and drink while watching a soccer match on the restaurant's big flat-screen TV. During a commercial break, there was an ad for some sort of insurance. As is common in Korea nowadays, the ad contained a sound bite recorded by a male North American voice. He said, "World Best!" Not the correct "The World's Best" mind you, but a direct, word-for-word translation of the Korean segye choego. (Korean has no articles and no need, in this case, for the possessive.)

As part of my ongoing not-very-scientific research into this phenomenon, I asked the guy I was with why they didn't just say the slogan in Korean. His answer was typical of what Koreans say when you ask that question: "But then it wouldn't have that modern, international cachet."

"But shouldn't they at least get the English correct and say 'The World's Best'?" I protested.

"That's too complicated," he said. "It's easier for Koreans to understand without all those extra little grammatical annoyances tacked on."

I wanted to say that, indeed, the whole point of advertising is to communicate your message clearly to the target audience and that the best way to do that in Korea would be to write the ad copy in Korean rather than in screwed-up English, but I'd been around that tree so many times before, I decided to just move on to another topic.

From the accent, I can safely say that the fellow who did the voice-over was a native speaker who would immediately recognize the awkwardness of the line he was given to say. Do you suppose he pointed out the problem to the director, account executive, or copywriter? I'll bet he didn't. After all, who knows where your next voice-over job might come from, and you don't want to become known as somebody who's difficult to work with. (Hmmm. Maybe that's why I never get asked to do stuff like that.)

I'm a very avid reader. I know I'm not alone in this, but I seem to be a somewhat extreme case. I guess you'd say "obsessive-compulsive reader" is a more accurate description. If I forget to take a book with me into the bathroom, I have to resort to reading shampoo bottles, hand-soap dispensers, or even toothpaste tubes. Well, I want you to know I consider myself lucky that I live in Korea, where most of this emergency reading material is in the Korean language, because judging from some of the product-package copy I've read during visits to the United States, I'd estimate that there are a dangerously large number of participles dangling all over American bathrooms.

Once when I was staying with a relative in Ohio, I innocently perused a bottle of lotion, and my hair stood on end when I read, "Rubbing in just a few drops, your skin will feel youthful and resilient." That night I had a nightmare in which my skin took on a life of its own and, leaving my body lying there in bed with its muscles (such as they are), tendons, fat deposits, and organs showing like one of those plasticized cadavers in a human-anatomy exhibit, marched into the bathroom and applied some of that lotion, all the while laughing in evil, stentorian tones that echoed throughout the house. I awoke with a start and immediately checked my skin. I was greatly relieved to find that it felt neither youthful nor resilient.

You'd think that in the space available on a credit card there wouldn't be enough room to commit this sort of error. But no. My Visa card, for some reason jumping to the conclusion that I have managed to get lost, kindly informs me that if someone finds me, I should please return to the Wooribank. I'm not making this up. Here's the direct quote: "If found, please return to Wooribank." I've checked, and apparently Visa cards the world over say this, except of course that the name of the issuing bank is different.

Okay, I know some of you out there are saying: "Come off it. Any idiot knows they mean that if you find a credit card someone has lost, you should return it to the bank that issued it." If any idiot knows that, how come the copywriter who wrote that line wasn't smart enough to say, "If you find a lost Visa card, please return it to the issuing bank"?

Having had lots of experience trying to fix such danglers myself, I can sympathize with the poor copywriter. Maybe he was a perfectionist who agonized over how to word his one chance to have a bit of his own copy carried around in the wallets of people all over the world. He might have thought: "What if someone loses her card and then later finds it again? Might she not mistakenly think she should return her own card to the bank?" In spite of the fact that any idiot would know you don't need to return your own card to the bank, he might have tried a couple dozen rewordings of the line until he gave up in despair and decided it would be easier to just go ahead and dangle the blasted participle.

Korean copywriters and editors are fortunate. They needn't suffer this sort of distress, because the Korean language has been spared the curse of participles.