“Happy birthday” is brief, clear and unobtrusive. “Happy birthday” says what needs to be said in four syllables. “Felicitous salutations on the anniversary of your nativity,” which consists of 21 syllables, requires the reader to figure out what on earth the writer is trying to say.

Theodore Bernstein says in The Careful Writer that the cliché “is sometimes the most direct way of expressing a thought.” The trick is being aware of the temptation to use a pat phrase thoughtlessly and, when you catch yourself doing that, to ask if there’s a better way to express the idea — a better way, not a fancier or more original way. Often there isn’t one. “Happy birthday” is good enough. You can’t improve upon it, and you waste everybody’s time, including your own, trying to spiff it up.

Follett, by the way, offers stern counsel against taking a cliché and trying to inject new life into it by inserting modifiers, like I did in the second paragraph when I wrote “the proverbial plague.” Writers who are showing off do that, to let the reader know that they know they are using a cliché but are determined to do it anyway. This is a mistake, Follett says. It is done “to affect originality where it is not wanted.” (My bad.)

So, Blithesome Christmas and a Fortuitous New Year!

Annoying Word of the Month: Intersection. Intersections of streets and roads make getting from one place to another possible, but as ways of linking big ideas and fuzzy abstractions, the formulation must be resisted. Here are some recent examples. The intersection of …

• Fashion and technology
• Government, farmers and artisans
• Sports, business and philanthropy
• Women and theatrical masks
• Corporate good and climate justice
• Hybrid work and diversity and inclusion
• On-demand services and big data
• Optics and art
• Environmental justice and civil rights

And my personal fave: Environment and eczema!