Hackneyed, Hidebound

Hackneyed- lacking in originality; overused

Ex: He scoffed at the chalkboard on the sidewalk outside of the café, which read, “Come try our mother-clucker chicken sandwich”. Not only was serving the same damn chicken sandwich as every other place extremely hackneyed, but naming it “mother-clucker” in a fruitless attempt at sounding cool was also an overplayed move. If you truly want to wow me as a customer, you have to be more creative. Maybe try rebranding it as the “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom”, or the “cluck cluck 3000” or the, “chicken little, yes, the real, cute chicken little from the movies, dead, de-feathered, brined in pickle juice, deep-fried, smothered in the 30-year-old secret jerk sauce of an elderly Trinidadian man from Flatbush, and laid to rest on a bed of microgreens swiped from the window box of an NYU English Professors’ brownstone in Park Slope”. Bonus points if your chalk artist can draw someone ripping the still-beating heart from Chicken Little’s chest.

Hidebound- unwilling to change because of tradition or convention

Ex: The hidebound school principal barred his teachers from discussing evolution with the students. To understand his reasoning, you have to consider the context of his upbringing within the bible belt. Every Sunday as a child, he followed the same routine. He woke up, made his bed, put on his gingham dress shirt and slacks, and went to church with his family. After church he had lunch, finished his homework, and then did his laundry. He made sure to carefully separate the whites from the colored clothing, as per his parents’ guidance. They didn’t have a dryer back then, so he hung everything up to dry on the clothesline. Everything except for his flowy white robe with its pointy hood, which rested on a scarecrow in the front yard. He had been taught that god rested on the seventh day. They never mentioned what happened on the eighth day, but he figured it probably involved some sort of night raid on the black community living on the outskirts of the Garden of Eden.