hackneyed
adjective

- describes a phrase or an idea which has been said or used so often that it has become boring and has no meaning

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary

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ORIGIN

During the 13th century in Medieval England, a small, sleepy village on the northeast side of London became famous for its horses and horse pastures. The name of the town was Hackney. The horses were mainly for riding, as opposed to war. And because they could be hired out, the word hackney became synonymous with any horses or vehicles (coach or carriage for instance) for hire. The famous London black taxis are still referred to as hackney carriages.

Hackney-type horses became a common sight because they were used for a wide variety of purposes. As a result, the expression hackney evolved in parallel to refer to something that was overused.

Around the turn of the 18th century, hackney was shortened to hack, as in someone who performs boring menial work. This further led to a description of journalists who churned out low-quality writing in assembly-line fashion.

Given its links to the town of Hackney, etymologists refer to the adjective hackneyed as a TOPONYM, which is a word named after a place. Other common words that are toponyms include:

— marathon = a very long foot race named after the battle of Marathon, Greece.

— tuxedo = semiformal evening dress for men named for Tuxedo Park, New York, site of a country club where it first was worn in 1886.

— bikini = a low-waisted, two-piece woman’s bathing suit named after the American A-bomb test of June 1946 on Bikini, Marshall Islands atoll, locally known as Pikinni.

— magenta = a reddish-pink colour that refers to the blood-soaked battlefield at the Battle of Magenta in 1859.

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SYNONYMS
How many do you know?

anachronistic, antiquated, as dry as dust, average, banal, battered, behind the times, big yawn, bland, bog-standard, boring, bygone, clichéd, cobwebby, colorless US, colourless UK, corny, deadly dull, defunct, disused, dog-eared, drab, dreary, dry as dust, dull, dull as dishwater, dullsville, dusty, exhausted, faded, familiar, familiar tune, formulaic, gone off, HACKNEYED, ho-hum, humdrum, insipid, jejune, kitschy, lacking interest, lackluster US, lacklustre UK, lame, leaden, lifeless, mediocre, mildewed, moth-eaten, mundane, no great shakes, not up to much, old-chestnut, old-fashioned, old-hat, old-time, olden, oldfangled, ordinary, out of fashion, out of style, out of the ark, out-of-date, outdated, outmoded, outworn, overdone, overused, passé, past their sell-by date, pedestrian, plain vanilla, played-out, routine, run-of-the-mill, rusty, samey, shopworn, standard, staple, stereotypical, stock, Stone Age, superannuated, time-worn, tired, trite, trivial, undistinguished, unimaginative, used-up, warmed-over, warmed-up, weathered, workaday, worn out, worn thin, worn-out, yawnsome

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Practice OWAD in an English conversation, say something like:

“I find the phrase ‘last but not least’ rather HACKNEYED, so I try to avoid it.”

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Paul Smith