Greeting Cards Are Cliches. Often Trite. So Why Do We Find Them Meaningful?

The strange thing is that these moments of love and loss are not the place where language finds its truest expression of meaning but are in fact the place where meaning itself starts to break down, where language as a whole reveals its incapacities. The cliché is a marker, or a stand-in, for something we aren’t sure how to express. Whether the message is pre-printed or one we resort to writing ourselves, clichés appear where words fail. In this way, greeting cards function as material testament to the lack of articulation at the heart of human experience, drawing attention to the gap between language and life.