A friend in need is a friend indeed: A convincingly argued essay in ten parts.

Cliches serve as an important tool for many reasons.

Firstly, they are amusing.
Take, if you will, my example of skinning a cat.
Apparently there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Catskin could be used to make clothes.
And clothes make the man.
I'm a man made out of catskin. Apparently. Who wants to skin cats? Leave the cats alone. They might join up with a gang of dogs and start raining on us.

Different strokes for different folks.
Too true, my cliched friend.
Secondly, cliches are sexual.
Sexual like a fox.
As sexual as a wham-bam thank-you Ma'm. I just bent her all out of shape then knocked her socks off.
Slippery when wet.

Thirdly, cliches and myself see eye to eye on many aspects of life.
We both love seeing the pool of language being diddled with.
We both know that one can never cease all diddling of language, [I use 'one', because as we both know I am a gentleman and a scholar.]
One can only diddle with language properly if he joins all of the other diddlers in the deep end.

Fourthly, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
For the first few minutes, anyway.
Then he would be a dead king.
Who the hell would believe someone if they said they could see when noone else could?
Look what they did to Jesus.
People. You can always trust people to be people.
Therefore fourthly, cliches are the best way to describe people. Because people = cliches.
Which came first, the person, or the cliche?

Fifthly, cliches are philosophical.
Philosophical like a fox.
Ever found yourself in a hole?
Hmmm. That cliche there needs some serious punctuation.
Because I don't know if I've ever found 'myself in a hole'.
Neither have I 'found myself', in a hole.
Or been walking along and suddenly stumbled across myself in a hole. Possibly a future version of me that has come back in time to warn me about falling into holes.
Ever found a hole in yourself? Metaphorically, I mean. What's gross for the goose is also gross for the gander. I shall have no smut in my fifthly argued point.
Sixthly, cliches are reversible if deep metaphorical ponderings are needed to be done.

You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
But you catch even more flies with shite.
The only thing more useless than shite? Fly-covered shite.
Seventhly, cliches are shite. Heh. Shite.

Eighthly, using cliches is like reinventing the wheel.

You know what really gets my goat?
When I get bats in the bellfry.
Ninthly, cliches make no sense at all.

Tenthly, cliches are unbearable.
Almost as unbearable as puns. Ever seen a bear wearing clothes that it has superglued to itself? It's an un-bare-able animal.

The light at the end of the tunnel: It seems the cat has got my tongue. It's bitten off more than it can chew. I am now beating a hasty retreat to the land of nod, in order to get forty winks.
If only I had some cat's pyjamas to wear.

And now the mice can play.