Car Park Clichés

I have returned from the gymnasium where I saw a powerful symbol of the world we now live in. The normal disabled car parks were out of use because of construction, so the good people at the gym placed temporary signs in front of the next nearest car parks to the gym door. They were steel signs held erect by an easel-style tripod arrangement.

Four of the five temporary disabled car park signs were still in action, but the fifth had been knocked over by a Land Cruiser that decided that a) it needed to reverse into the car park and make a big show of it, because Land Cruisers never park easily and the drivers savour the wait they make everyone else in the car park endure while they dock their vessel, b) it didn't matter that they were parking in a disabled car park that they were not entitled to, and c) knocking over the sign didn't matter because capitalism has bestowed upon them the alienation from their true human spirit that makes them careless and selfish. Carefish, I think the attitude is called.

People at my new work speak in clichés some of the time, stuff like 'you can't just come off the street' or 'so this is a stop-gap job'. They're not really clichéd clichés, sort of fringe ones that are still clichés because they're pre-packaged words for concepts that would otherwise take more time to communicate, but ones that only freethinkers use.

The sentence previous would be significantly less communicable if one of the new breed of Australians, who refuses to mark nouns when converted to their adjectival form, tried to communicate with you.

'That's so cliché,' they say. 'I was so tan over summer,' they say. This is okay if you're an American and don't know better, but Australians - and anyone who has been raised on the English language - should know better. See:

1. I am tanning/I have tanned/I am a tanned person (temporarily)/this bag is (the colour) tan.
   
2. That's so clichéd/the clichéd blog entry/this is a clichéd blog entry/this is a blog entry about clichés.

'My skin is tan' does not work because not only is your skin not permanently the colour of tan (unless you've had pretty radical and awesome surgery), and your language should acknowledge this, but also because people who give a damn will instantly know that you're a bit Paris Hilton, and not in the cool way like putting out and stuff.

Toodle.