Literary notes about hackneyed (AI summary)
In literature, "hackneyed" is often deployed to signal that certain expressions or ideas have become stale through excessive repetition. Writers use the term to critique language or plot devices that, despite their evident truth or popularity, no longer stir the reader’s imagination—for instance, a clichéd portrayal of love or fate is derided as hackneyed when it strips originality from the narrative [1, 2]. At times, it appears in character commentary, where even the simplest rationalizations or descriptions are branded hackneyed for their lack of freshness [3, 4]. Style guides and literary critics alike warn that such overworked phrasing can dilute meaning and weaken prose, yet some authors intentionally revive these worn expressions by framing them in innovative contexts, thereby challenging what it means for an idea to become hackneyed [5, 6].
- The hackneyed expression to describe the decadence of an age is "that the civilians loved money and the soldiers feared death.
— from Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe - From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde - I have seen a gipsy vagabond; she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of palmistry and told me what such people usually tell.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë - The actual plot can only be described as hackneyed.
— from Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun - Another hackneyed word; like factor it usually adds nothing to the sentence in which it occurs.
— from The Elements of Style by William Strunk - A hackneyed word; the expressions of which it forms part can usually be replaced by something more direct and idiomatic.
— from The Elements of Style by William Strunk
