But feel-good foreigner comedy is not the main way we encounter clichés. Usually clichés are used correctly and unthinkingly. So correctly and unthinkingly that mostly we don’t hear them, especially when we say them ourselves. The ways in which canned speech — even the can is now canned! — obstructs thinking, obscures evil and turns us into unknowing automatons have been very intelligently and thoroughly considered already: George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and George Carlin’s comedy sketch on “shell shock” (about how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue” became “operational exhaustion” became “post-traumatic stress disorder”) are particularly precise and witty. If you are looking for important thinking about cliché, I would go look at either of those pieces before reading the rest of this column. The Carlin bit is about euphemisms, but any popular euphemism is as much a cliché as linguine is pasta.

I can, however, think of one minor point about cliché that fits well into this narrow space. Clichés are like the old talismans dug up at an archaeological site. They often endure even when the times and places that produced them have passed on. When, for example, did we start to say “passed on”? When did glory start showing up in blazes and majorities become vast? When did war become something we wage? When did social commentary so often become searing, and was it around the same time that a certain demographic took a fancy to seared scallops? Why is lyrical something we wax, and why is a whip something we want to be as smart as? At some point someone’s goat was got, someone’s envelope was pushed and the mouth of someone’s gift horse was examined. None of these things happen any more. But we still use the old phrases, like hikers unrolling sleeping mats in the ancient temple at Petra.

Clichés obliquely tell us more than they mean to. Consider the term of affection “doll.” It was an endearment for a female, animal or human, at least as far back as the 1500s; the word took on the connotation of “slattern” in the late 1600s; it became a word for a kind of toy around 1700. Then it returned as a darling, having passed from human to nonhuman and then back again. Nowadays, “doll” feels a bit Bogart, but you can still buy one at the store.

Or “the bane of my existence.” The word “bane” is now almost never used, except in this phrase. And the phrase now feels like a comically hyperbolic way to refer to something annoying. But “bane” has roots in words for poison and murder. “Banal” is another word we say often, even as most of us are unaware that its precise meaning derives from something unexpected: the obligatory service that serfs owed their feudal lord. To speak these words and phrases that have traveled to us from other times is akin to speaking in tongues, just a tongue that passes too well as language at its most simple and clear.

Rivka Galchen is a recipient of a William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Berlin Prize, among other distinctions. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s and The New Yorker, which selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed “Atmospheric Disturbances,” was published in 2008. Her second book, a story collection titled “American Innovations,” was published in May.