Express Purposes

I've been dipping into Fierce Pajamas, a collection of humorous writing from The New Yorker.

There's a piece from 1935 by Frank Sullivan, "The Cliche Expert Takes The Stand." In essence, it's an expert witness responding to a series of questions with cliched figures of speech. It's funny, but it's also of etymological interest, because we can see how a lot of cliches haven't quite survived the passage of time

Most of them we still know: Live to a ripe old age, broaden your horizons, frightened out of your wits, beat a hasty retreat, throw caution to the winds. A few are (to use a cliche) teetering on the brink, like a pretty kettle of fish or shot with luck. But some of them you just don't hear any more, such as fat, fair and forty, or drunk as a coot, or brown as a berry, or apple-pie order, or gay dog. It's good to know even cliches go out of fashion--to be replaced by new ones, I suppose.