Trite or True?

What makes a cliché a cliché? And how do you know a trusty old adage is true or merely trite?

I’ve heard from many good-intentioned people, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

I hear this quip most often in the context of discussions about wealth and poverty. I think the main assumption of this notion, then, is that the ‘man’ in question is destitute and therefore in desperate need of either a fish to eat or the knowledge of how to fish.

This popular and well-aged saying is, of course, logically incoherent and falls victim to a number...