Rewrite your least favorite buzz phrase
A few years ago, my nephew Evan — aka one of the five most adorable boys in the world — was attending Catholic preschool.
It was his introduction to Jesus and heaven, and he’d been busy processing how all of this applied to his own life. When his uncle died, he wondered aloud when Jesus was going to finish fixing Uncle Carl and send him home.
When he and I sat down for a visit a few months after school started, he asked, “Aunt Ann, why is your hair white?” I answered the way I answer all the 4-year-olds who ask that question: “I don’t know, Evan. Why do you think my hair is white?”
“Because you’re going to visit Jesus?”
he ventured.
Thankfully, Evan’s guestimate has been wrong to date. But it’s not the first interesting response I’ve received about my loopy hair since it started turning white when I was 16. And since I belatedly made rock star stylist Mary Jane Van de Castle CEO of my head, my hair has been getting longer and kookier.
My sister, Lynn — the one who inherited all the good judgment in my family — has started urgently counseling headbands. Then last month, at a spa, a woman asked a question similar to my nephew’s, though less gracious:
“What’s that on your head?” she asked.
“A Chia Pet?”
Though I couldn’t take that as a compliment, I did appreciate her excellent use of analogy.
It goes without saying that my next stop was the headband store. When I showed my husband my new purchases, he said: “How nice. A Chia-management solution.”
“Darling,” I said, lovingly, “I believe you’ve just resurrected a cliché.”
What’s your least favorite cliché or buzz phrase? How can you revive that cliché to turn it into wordplay? Try:
- Reversing, combining or flipping overused expressions
- Riffing off of worn-out sayings
- Twisting tired turns of phrase
How can you surprise and delight readers?
Neurologists call it “the pleasure of the text,” the reward readers get from figuring out figurative language. (It can be quite a reward: If your wordplay is funny enough, your readers’ brains even deliver a little dose of dopamine.)
Bring Ann in to present Master the Art of Storytelling, a business-storytelling workshop — to your team.
There, they’ll learn to flip phrases; compress details; sub sound-alikes; list, rhyme and twist — even coin new words with free online tools that do the work for you. They’ll get inspired by some of the world’s most creative headlines. And they’ll polish their skills in a wordplay workout, with recipes from anagram to oxymoron.
Leave a Reply