Which one of the following is the synonym of the word written in capital letters in the sentence, “She has the habit of using HACKNEYED and redundant examples from her past even while dealing with the future generation”?

Correct — C, (c) Clichéd.

‘Hackneyed’ means made stale and tiresome by being used too often. It is not a word about quality in the abstract: a hackneyed phrase may once have been a fine phrase, and what is wrong with it now is that everybody has used it. The word comes from the hackney, a horse kept for hire — the sense preserved in ‘hackney carriage’, still the formal term for a licensed taxi in Britain, and in ‘hack’ for a writer who turns out work to order. A hired horse was ridden by anyone who paid and was worn out by the traffic, and that is precisely the metaphor the adjective carries: worn out by indiscriminate use.

‘Clichéd’ is the same metaphor taken from a different trade. A cliché in French printing was the stereotype plate — a solid block cast from set type so that the same line could be struck off again and again without resetting it. A clichéd expression is one that comes off the plate ready-made, needing no fresh thought from the person using it. So the two words agree not merely in being disapproving but in the exact ground of the disapproval: repetition has emptied the thing of force.

The sentence supplies the confirming clue. ‘She has the habit of using HACKNEYED and redundant examples’ coordinates the tested word with ‘redundant’, and two adjectives joined by ‘and’ in this position pull in the same direction; ‘redundant’ means superfluous, more than is needed, which is a fault of the same family. ‘Habit’ in the same clause says the thing is done over and over. A candidate who has never met ‘hackneyed’ can still reach the answer from those two words alone, because the sentence has already told him that the adjective is a criticism and that the criticism is about repetition.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Indifferent — ‘Indifferent’ most commonly means unconcerned or showing no interest — indifferent to the outcome, an indifferent shrug — which describes an attitude and not the examples themselves. It does carry an older second sense, ‘of no great quality, middling’, as in an indifferent meal or an indifferent performance, and that sense is the near-miss this option is built on, since it is at least a criticism. But mediocre and hackneyed are different charges: a hackneyed example may be a very good example that has simply been used too many times, and a mediocre one may be perfectly fresh. Nothing in ‘indifferent’ carries the idea of overuse, which is the whole of what the tested word means.
• (b)Imaginative — ‘Imaginative’ means showing invention and originality — an imaginative solution, an imaginative teacher. It is the direct opposite of the tested word rather than a synonym of it, because what is hackneyed is exactly what required no imagination. The sentence makes the mismatch plain: the examples are criticised as ‘redundant’ and are drawn ‘from her past’ out of habit, and neither phrase describes invention. This option catches the candidate who reads the sentence as praise for a teacher’s style instead of as a complaint about it.
• (d)Impressive — ‘Impressive’ means commanding admiration or respect — an impressive record, an impressive turnout — and like ‘imaginative’ it points the wrong way. The sentence is a complaint, marked as one by ‘habit’, by ‘redundant’ and by the contrast drawn between her past and ‘the future generation’; an adjective of praise cannot be the synonym of the word inside it. The trap here is choosing on tone alone after noticing that the sentence is about teaching, without testing whether the option can stand where the capitalised word stands.

English has a small set of words for the fault of staleness through repetition, and they are worth learning together because examiners rotate them: hackneyed, clichéd, trite, banal, stereotyped, threadbare, platitudinous, commonplace, stock and time-worn. Each carries the same charge — that the expression comes ready-made — and several of them keep a physical metaphor inside: hackneyed from the hired horse ridden to exhaustion, clichéd and stereotyped from printing plates cast so that a line could be repeated without being reset, threadbare from cloth worn until the weave shows.

The distinctions inside the set are small but real. ‘Trite’ (from Latin terere, to rub, the root also of ‘attrition’) stresses that the thought has been rubbed smooth; ‘banal’ stresses dullness and want of substance; ‘commonplace’ is the mildest and can be merely neutral; ‘platitude’ names the thing itself, a flat remark uttered as though it were profound. Around them sit the opposites an antonym item would use — original, novel, fresh, inventive, unhackneyed.

The general principle the item teaches is that a synonym must match on the ground of the meaning, not only on its polarity. Three of these options can be sorted by whether they praise or blame, but the one that survives has to blame for the same reason the tested word blames.

Key facts

• ‘Hackneyed’ means made stale by overuse; it comes from the hackney, a horse kept for hire, the sense that survives in ‘hackney carriage’ and in ‘hack’ for a writer working to order.
• ‘Cliché’ is French for the stereotype printing plate, cast so that a line could be struck off repeatedly without resetting the type; a clichéd phrase is one that comes ready-made.
• Both words blame an expression for the same reason — repetition has emptied it of force — which is what makes them synonyms rather than merely two words of disapproval.
• The related set is trite (Latin terere, to rub), banal, stereotyped, threadbare, platitudinous and stock; their opposites are original, novel, fresh and inventive.
• ‘Indifferent’ has a second, older sense of ‘middling in quality’, which is a criticism but not a criticism about overuse.
• In the printed booklet option (c) appears as ‘Clichéd’, with the acute accent kept on the first vowel of the French original.

Common traps

• Sorting the options only into praise and blame. Two of these are praise and can go at once, but the remaining pair both blame and have to be separated on the ground of the charge.
• Reading ‘indifferent’ in its everyday sense of ‘uninterested’ and rejecting it for the wrong reason, or reading it as ‘mediocre’ and accepting it for the wrong reason.
• Taking the sentence as praise of a teacher because it mentions examples and the future generation, when ‘habit’ and ‘redundant’ mark it as a complaint.
• Ignoring the accent in ‘Clichéd’ and hunting for a more English-looking option; a borrowed word is still an English word once the language has taken it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is the synonym of the word written in capital letters in the sentence, “His speech was full of BANAL observations about hard work”?

  • (a)Original
  • (b)Commonplace
  • (c)Angry
  • (d)Lengthy

  Answer(b) Commonplace — ‘banal’ means dull and unoriginal, so ordinary as to be without interest, which is what ‘commonplace’ says. ‘Original’ is its opposite, and ‘angry’ and ‘lengthy’ describe the temper and the size of a speech rather than the staleness of what it contains.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is the synonym of the word written in capital letters in the sentence, “The committee rejected the report for its TRITE conclusions”?

  • (a)Hasty
  • (b)Detailed
  • (c)Stale
  • (d)Bold

  Answer(c) Stale — ‘trite’ is from Latin terere, to rub, and describes a thought rubbed smooth by constant use, which is exactly the figurative sense of ‘stale’. ‘Hasty’ blames the speed of the work, ‘detailed’ and ‘bold’ are not criticisms at all.