You said: THOUGHT OF THE DAY:
THOUGHT OF THE DAY: "Remember that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away!" - Vicki Corona, from Tahitian Choreographies (1989), p36.
I wonder how this got taken as something significant, it doesn't really say anything, although it does make me wonder how the expression "took my breath away" got going.
Claude responded: You've spotted something real there.
You've spotted something real there. The quote has that quality of sounding profound while being almost content-free — it's basically saying "life is about good experiences," dressed up in a chiasmus. The parallel structure ("breaths we take" / "take our breath away") creates a feeling of wit and depth that the actual idea doesn't quite earn. It's the rhetorical equivalent of a confidence trick.
And it has spread enormously — it's usually misattributed to Maya Angelou or George Carlin, which tells you something about how these things travel. The Vicki Corona origin is surprisingly obscure given how ubiquitous the quote became.
As for "took my breath away" — that's a genuinely interesting one. The literal mechanism is old: shock, fear, awe, and physical exertion all cause a sharp involuntary intake of breath or a momentary suspension of breathing. The body's response to overwhelming sensation is, quite literally, to interrupt normal breathing. So the metaphor is grounded in something real and physical.
The expression in English goes back centuries in various forms. You find constructions like "it left me breathless" in early modern writing, often describing fear or shock as much as beauty — the two were less distinguished than we might think. A sudden sight of something terrifying and something magnificent produce almost the same physiological response.
What's interesting is how the phrase gentrified over time. It started covering the full range of overwhelming sensation (terror, grief, shock) and gradually narrowed toward the romantic and the sublime — beauty, love, stunning landscapes. By the time Hollywood got hold of it, "breathtaking" had become almost exclusively positive. The 1990 film Ghost probably cemented "take your breath away" as the ultimate romantic cliché.
So the Corona quote is essentially recycling a phrase that had already done most of its emotional work centuries earlier, and dressing it up as wisdom. No wonder it feels hollow on inspection.
You said: Becoming a cliché is the unfortunate fate of a lot of expressions.
Becoming a cliché is the unfortunate fate of a lot of expressions.
Claude responded: Yes, and there's a cruel irony in it — the expressions that become clichés are usually the ones that were most vivid and accurate when first coined.
Yes, and there's a cruel irony in it — the expressions that become clichés are usually the ones that were most vivid and accurate when first coined. They spread precisely because they captured something so well, and the spreading is what kills them.
"Cold shoulder," "turning point," "heart of the matter" — these were once genuinely fresh metaphors that made someone stop and think yes, exactly that. Now they just slide through the mind without registering at all. The very success of the image destroys it.
George Orwell had a useful way of thinking about this — he distinguished between dead metaphors (so worn they function as plain words, like "the leg of a table") and dying metaphors (still recognizable as images but no longer doing any work). The dying ones are the most treacherous, because writers reach for them thinking they're being vivid, when actually they're just being lazy. "Breathtaking" is probably somewhere in that middle zone now.
There's also something interesting about who gets credited with coining things. Often a phrase only becomes a cliché after it's been detached from its original context and speaker. Shakespeare coined an enormous number of expressions that people now use without any sense that they came from somewhere specific — "vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "heart of gold." They've become part of the anonymous common stock of the language, which is arguably the ultimate success and the ultimate erasure simultaneously.
It's a kind of linguistic tragedy of the commons — the more people use something, the less valuable it becomes.
You said: Using a cliché is a bit like making a deliberate grammatical error, or even using an unsacrilegious swear word, if done right it can be effective in a perverse…
Using a cliché is a bit like making a deliberate grammatical error, or even using an unsacrilegious swear word, if done right it can be effective in a perverse way to say the opposite. So, I might say something took my breath away meaning I was unimpressed.
Claude responded: That's a sharp observation.
That's a sharp observation. It works because the gap between the expected meaning and the delivered meaning is the joke, or the point. The cliché becomes a kind of deadpan tool — you're borrowing its hollowness rather than fighting it.
It's related to irony more broadly, but there's something specific about using a worn-out expression for this purpose. The very exhaustion of the phrase does the work. If you said "I was somewhat underwhelmed" you'd be making the same point but it would land flat. Saying "it took my breath away" with the right delivery signals that you're too sophisticated to mean it literally, which is itself a form of wit.
The grammatical equivalent would be something like deliberately writing a sentence fragment. For effect. It works because the reader senses the rule being knowingly broken rather than ignorantly broken — there's an implied wink.
Comedians do this constantly with clichés — Steven Wright built an entire style around delivering them in contexts that made them absurd. And British understatement runs on a similar engine, using bland or even positive phrasing to convey the opposite — "not entirely without its faults" meaning "catastrophically bad."
The unsacrilegious swear word example is interesting too — "bloody" in British English has almost completed that journey. It was once genuinely offensive, then became a mild intensifier, and now can be deployed almost affectionately. It's lost its bite so completely that using it ironically to suggest bite is itself an option.
Language is endlessly cannibalistic that way.
You said: "The number of breaths we take" is token for how long we live, not really a cliché but in this context forced and off tune in order to work with the ensuing cl…
"The number of breaths we take" is token for how long we live, not really a cliché but in this context forced and off tune in order to work with the ensuing cliché.
Claude responded: You're right, and that's a more precise dissection than I offered.
You're right, and that's a more precise dissection than I offered. It's not that "the number of breaths we take" is itself a cliché — it's that it has to be constructed rather than reaching naturally for an existing expression. You can feel the effort in it. The writer needed something breath-related on the left side of the equation to set up the payoff, and so manufactured a slightly awkward formulation that nobody would ever use naturally.
Which actually makes it worse than a cliché in a way. A cliché at least has the virtue of flowing smoothly — it slots in without friction. This has to do work it wasn't built for, straining to justify its own existence purely as a setup.
It's the rhetorical equivalent of a joke where the premise is visibly engineered just to reach the punchline. You can see the scaffolding. And once you see it, the whole structure looks a bit rickety — the apparent profundity depends on not looking too closely at the left side of the equation.
The formula sounds like it has the shape of a genuine aphorism — the kind where both halves illuminate each other. But really only one half was ever alive. The other was just there to hold it up.
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