Puttin' on the Ritz A fair number of men and women, from Amelia Bloomer to Captain Charles Boycott to the Earl of Sandwich and the Reverend William Spooner, are remembered as nouns, but fewer have made contributions so distinctive as to be immortalized as adjectives. One of them was Cesar Ritz. He was born in the village of Niederwald, Switzerland in 1850, the thirteenth child of a farming couple. He tended the family's cows until his father arranged for him to be apprenticed to a wine waiter at a nearby hotel. It didn't go well. After a year, he was fired and told that he would never make anything of himself in the hotel business. He tried again, was fired again, and moved to France, where he was fired a third time, this time for breaking dishes. Ritz persevered and eventually rose through the ranks of restaurants and hotels in Nice, Monte Carlo, Lucerne, Baden-Baden, and other of the favorite spots for the rich and famous of the day. By 1888, he had made enough of a name for himself that a former client, Rupert D'Oyly Carte, invited him to manage a new luxury hotel in London. Under his management, the Savoy became a sensation, known for its elegance, perfect service, and a chef that Ritz had hired, by the name of Auguste Escoffier. In 1896, Ritz was persuaded to open a hotel in Paris that would bear his name. He took two years to find a suitable building, a mansion on the Place Vendome, and to assemble the right furnishings. He ordered apricot-colored lampshades, believing that their muted light was flattering to women. Eventually, there were Ritz hotels in several cities, some better and ritzier than others. There were also dozens of enterprises in London and New York alone, from shirt-makers to fish-n-chips places, that bore the name. When told that his father's hotels were too fancy for some, his son said, "The Ritz is not ritzy."
I used to work with this goof who would constantly misuse words. My ALL TIME FAVE which is now a classic among coworkers, was this - in a meeting one day he exclaimed that he was going to have to 'throw down the gondola.' I still love this expression, because after all, a gondola is even heavier and harder to throw than a gauntlet and I can use it to paddle around in when I need transport across waterways, etc.
A cliche' is simply an old, tired expression. So most of what I say could be considered a cliche'... I'm old and tired.