Pleiad - in Greek mythology the Pleiades were the daughters of Atlas (the Titan holding up the sky), and there were SEVEN of them, just like in the group of seven
stars called the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus. Using this word to mean a group of brilliant people, but more than seven, is an example of a cliché /klišé/, in English as well as in
Slovak.
Originally a cliché was the French word for an imprint of a wood engraving or block of type dropped into hot metal (imitating the sound it made). Then it came to mean
a photographic negative, and finally a phrase or idiom which is used, copied and reproduced so many times that it loses its original šmrnc and becomes worn out and irritating.
These phrases should be unusable, and English football commentators should not say that a coach is "over the moon" when his team wins, or "sick as a parrot" when they
lose. Similarly, Slovak journalists should really STOP referring to a car ("osobné auto") as "štvorkolesový, oceľový tátoš", because that is a horrible cliché.
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