Arts: For Journalists Who Love Clich?s, Every Day is Groundhog Day

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Brow Beat For Journalists Who Love Clichés, Every Day is Groundhog Day By Jim Pagels Posted Thursday, Feb 02, 2012, at 01:17 PM ET It's Groundhog Day all over again for newspaper reporters and columnists comparing the day's events to the 1993 Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. While Slate readers recently declared the film to be the smartest rom-com of the past 25 years, journalists have a tendency to reference the movie less than intelligently. Saying that a repeated event is "like Groundhog Day" has become a cliché—and one that has been leached almost entirely of meaning. Such allusions have become so common that, in his column on the NBA this week, Bill Simmons made one without even using the movie's name. Speaking of LeBron's repeated failures in the clutch, he declared that "Miami should just hire Bill Murray, Chris Elliott and Andie MacDowell to sit on its bench." On the off-chance you're less familiar with the film, Murray stars as a weatherman who experiences the same day over and over again until he learns to love (or something). For an event to truly resemble Groundhog Day, then, it should happen again and again, in more or less identical fashion, and ideally on consecutive days. Typically, however, these are not the kinds of events reporters are describing when they drag out the Harold Ramis classic. "Jeff Zimmerman's recent baseball biography reads like a broken record, or in a more modern idiom, 'Groundhog Day,'" wrote Murray Chass in the New York Times in 2005. Baseball writers seem particularly drawn to the analogy, perhaps because of the game's ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate "I'm Not Concerned About the Very Poor": Will It Be Romney's "Guns and Religion"? Why Do I Have 60,000 Followers on Facebook? And Why Do They Post Such Cheesy Come-ons? The Artist Who Throws Herself at Men. Literally.	Advertisement
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