Cliches. Now they are funny things. Many people use them but don't even know what they are.
I mix often in exalted intellectual company, but I would be a liar if I did not admit some of my friends refer to them as clishes.
Because not all of them are exalted.
I prefer clishes to cliches, it has quite a swish to it.
Occasionally this inner circle mix them up inadvertently and come out the other end with an extremely incomprehensible malapropism.
It is the mixed clish which brings me the most joy, and I may well use this more and more in the future.
It is awfully important in this mad mad world where Koreans are making us look like drongos in everything from golf to computer games - do you realise the top Korean teenagers who play dodo make 400 keyboard finger moves every MINUTE?
Kiwis cannot do this, not even, I suspect, - what with our education system slowed almost to a complete halt by Mrs Parata - Korean Kiwis like Lydia Ko and Danny Lee.
Thus we try and hold on to the back bumper of life's fast-departing Kias.
It's obvious innit?
I pretty much only read the sports pages in the newspaper.
Hence I can bang my fist on the table and state without fear of contradiction that local basketballer Sam King should be in the Tall Blacks' Olympic squad ahead of non-achieving wasters like Duane Bailey and Leon Henry.
And the sports pages slump beneath the colossal weight of clishes, they're everywhere.
All Blacks have made it into government before, but if one were to go the whole hog and become Prime Minister, he would have a raft of rugby coaches to choose from as Minister of Clishes.
Or any sports person who has to say something to a thrusted microphone.
Well, they say, we knew they would bring it to us.
Pfft!
How do you know this?
And what exactly did they bring?
Bad breath?So we should mix the clishes up.
The game isn't over until the fat lady sings with an elephant in the room.
Impossible.
Not enough space.
And it's 2015, you can't say Fat Lady, or the Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy, herself a sporting icon, would jump up and down like an Energiser battery.
She would, in fact, be giving 110%.
But mixed clishes could be given exemption, as they derive from wit and congenital intellectual error.
The Highlanders were a team who punched above the bride and were never the bridesmaid.
One would scratch one's head deconstructing that one, but in the end, truth would prevail over cerebral swirl.
The true sports fan knows that this sums up the entire history of the franchise: for once cheating referees did not thwart us at the final hurdle.
The final hurdle?
See how clishes just leap off the keyboard like flying fish?
We could do better with this one.
It's a game of two final hurdles, one inevitably thrown under the bus.
The final hurdles seemed the same height to Cosgrove and Cron, but sadly, Cron didn't take into account the top two inches.
It's a whole new ball game, you can cut the tension with a knife, unless the tension is wired up to a power socket. But that's sport.
This was such a close game, it was a shame somebody had to win all the marbles.
Winners often get gypped by sports writers and commentators who, really, want every team to lose because writing about despair, misfortune, tragedy, food poisoning and cheating referees is so much easier.
He's the team's elder statesman but he could have a new lease on life if he goes the extra nine yards and doesn't fall flat on his face.
You could really apply this to every person playing sport.
Not falling flat on the face is the thought that confronts every competitor running out on to the field.
It makes sport the wonderful thing it is.
A container-load of talented physically fit humans bonded by bowel-loosening fear, put into words by the sporting media, stultifying clishes dripping from every tooth.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
