We speak not here of the mere borrowing of cliches; nor of the crushingly formulaic. It is easy to laugh at bad titles, particularly the bad titles of bad books. It is, perhaps, more useful to examine the ways in which certain extraordinarily uncongenial phrases offend the eye and ear every time one sees them in a bookstore, in an advertisement, or on a web page. I propose an anatomy -- a necessarily whimsical one, to be sure -- of the greatest offenders of our sensibilities. Here are three categories to begin with. More doubtless exist, but this will do for a start.

The Clunker

This is the kind that just sounds dreadful if one imagines it falling out of one's mouth. Bad books frequently have graceful euphonius titles, but many books both good and bad seem to have been titled by people hoping to demonstrate that they were raised by Bizarro Superman. Business and self-help books seem to yield a lot of these off-sounding titles. Now, Discover Your Strengths, for example, deploys "Now" in an attempt to lend urgency to a platitude (and to connect it to a previous title: First, Break All the Rules). The resulting phrase is as bland as possible, yet somehow also...wrong. It's like trying to gussy up oatmeal with a few slices of a dill pickle.

More winceworthy is the horrible detour into punmanship: with a title milking the text's questionable analogy between workers and captive cetaceans, Kenneth Blanchard's Whale Done! offends the ear so completely that I suspect no other book title of our time will match it for eliciting pain. I feel I can actually hear some cretin fatuously congratulating me on a pointless job "WHALE done!"

A certain strain of lighthearted category mysteries also tends in this direction, but although Killer Hair: A Crime of Fashion and Hocus Croakus are indeed themselves near-criminal offenses of lazy wordplay, we should be lenient with the authors, since such abominations are almost expected in certain fields.

The Windmill

These titles, swollen with gas, float before one's eye in the bookstore and beg to be punctured. No one genre is more truly guilty than another of this particular crime in titling, although perhaps literary fiction winds up in this category with notable frequenc -- and authors at all levels of accomplishment fall prey. Which is worse -- Updike's Seek my Face or Nicholas Sparks' Nights in Rodanthe? An impossible decision.

Horror and suspense also produces a number of these inflated title monstrosities -- Cerulean Sins, by Laurell K. Hamilton being a perfect example. One should also nod in the direction of Stephen King's From a Buick 8, which manages to sound self-important and a bit like a typographical error at the same time.

In the pretentiousness department, of course, the past master is the late, great Robert Ludlum, whose formula of "The [Name] [Portentous Abstraction]" has been almost endlessly parodied. While no one title stands out (is The Prometheus Deception any worse than The Osterman Weekend? Well, OK, yes, but you get the idea), Ludlum's greatest howler is perhaps on display in the title of The Cry of the Halidon This thriller was originally published under a psuedonym, as if the author understood that such screaming badness was wretched even for him.

(It goes without saying that to attack epic fantasy titles on these grounds would be to shoot already dead fish in a barrell, with a howitzer.)

Seriesitis

It's understandable that an author with a series needs to maintain whatever tag lets readers know that this book, indeed, fits the beloved mold already established by thirty or so masterworks that have gone before. But some do it with a certain amount of grace, and others make a poor choice early on, and then are stuck with it. J.D. Robb's series of futuristic crime-romance tales uses the rather uninspiring phrase "...in Death" as the basis for each entry's name. While the first title, Naked in Death, simply sounds agreeably pulp-y, the sequelae suffer. Conspiracy in Death, Holiday in Death, Judgment in Death...death, be not proud, for you'll apparently run around with any old adjective or noun, even the ones you have nothing to say to.

Barbara Parker's "Suspicion of..." series has the converse problem. While a Suspicion of Deceit is plausible, a Suspicion of Innoncence is confusing, and Suspicion of Vengeance begins to sound like crime-novelist glossolalia.

Some series novels take a bad turn, titlewise, and then recover: Janet Evanovich started off with One for the Money and punningly sequeled with Two for the Dough -- a neat enough twist that the ear can handle. Then, however, Three to Get Deadly came along, with its nails scraping on the blackboard -- a bad combo of an almost-rhyme with the fact that "to Get Deadly" barely makes any sense. Four to Score was like a verbal shrug -- after the tortured half-cleverness of the previous title, this was just surrender to the vestige of form. Only the ill-considered rhyme remained.

But all was not lost! Evanovich wisely lightened her touch with the titles, and used the ordinal numbers more simply from then on: High Five, Hot Six, Seven Up, Hard Eight, To the Nines.

Poetry it ain't, but it doesn't echo horribly in my inner ear, either. And given the number of titles that do, I'm ready to give the woman some kind of award: Euphony under trying series-writer circumstances. Whale done, indeed.

Next: the problem of Romance.