A cliché is an idea, a phrase, or a story-shape people have used so many times that it has gone soft. It no longer surprises anyone, and often it no longer says anything sharp. “Every cloud has a silver lining,” a film that ends with a race to the airport, a speech that only says “follow your dreams” — these can all be clichés when they feel tired. If you call something a cliché, you are gently complaining: you mean it is lazy or stale. Though actually, we all reach for clichés when we are tired or polite; they are well-worn paths in talk, and they became worn because they once worked. The word is borrowed from French and still often keeps the accent: cliché. In French it first named a printing plate that stamps the same picture again and again; that is why it came to mean a phrase used once too often. In English almost nobody means the plate now. People also say “That’s so cliché,” using the noun like an adjective; careful writing prefers clichéd for that job, but you will hear both.