Reply #28: Well, from my perspective, cliches become cliches by being true.

[NNadir]

In this sense, cliches provide a useful shorthand.

In any case, discourse is rather dry (and often boring) without cheering. I appereciate hearing from everyone. In any case, one always has the option of ignoring what one doesn't like. How much precious time does it really take to open and close a post, particularly a post that includes a cliche, cliches being brief. (Many of the cliches appear in the titles, so it is pretty easy to ignore them.)

You are also assuming that everyone knows what everyone else knows, or has heard, before. Personally, I am perfectly willing to put up with hearing somethings twice, or for that matter 50 times, to prevent the risk of not hearing something the first time because people already assume that I have "naturally" heard x or y or z before.

There are still some old jokes that are new to me, and I don't, by the way, consider myself to be wholly out of touch with the world or isolated.

DU has tens of thousands of posters, many of whom have written many thousands of posts. It is my opinion that there would be few such people if people spent too much time hesitating because they feel compelled to be "witty and original." If we banned posts that are not witty and original, I suspect the number of posts would fall by a factor of 100.