[A humble request: If you can, please donate to help me carry on tracing word histories. Thank you.]

 

The humorous self-contradictory phrase to avoid clichés like the plague includes the clichéd phrase to avoid like the plague in order to express the necessity of avoiding clichés.

The noun cliché designates an expression regarded as unoriginal or trite due to overuse (it is also used as a mass noun).

The phrase to avoid like the plague, and its variants, mean: to avoid at all costs, to shun completely. This phrase is first recorded, as to eschew as the plague, in the following from Delectable demaundes, and pleasaunt questions, with their seuerall aunswers, in matters of loue, naturall causes, with morall and politique deuises. Newely translated out of Frenche into Englishe, this present yere of our Lorde God. 1566 (London: Printed by John Cawood for Nicholas England, [1566]) [Questions of loue, and the Ansvvers, page unnumbered]:

Whether do ye esteme greatest, the beautie or the foulnes of those that can not content them selues with the loue of one?
The foulenes is farre greater.
What deserue they? to be loued, or hated?
In my Iudgement they should be hated and eschewed as the plague.

Typically used as a piece of advice for writers, the phrase to avoid clichés like the plague has itself become a cliché. The following, for example, is from Food for thought is sign of the times, an article consisting entirely of clichés, by Glenn Dromgoole, published in the Sunday Abilene Reporter-News (Abilene, Texas, USA) of Sunday 22^nd December 2019 [page 5F, column 1]:

In the best of all possible worlds, writers should avoid cliches like the plague. But beggars can’t be choosers.
With all due respect, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Between you and me and the gatepost, a writer had better be safe than sorry. Our actions speak louder than words.
On the other hand, it goes without saying that, for better or worse, sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees, and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Then we have to let the chips fall where they may since we can’t have our cake and eat it, too.

These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase to avoid clichés like the plague and variants that I have found:

1-: From the column John Robertson’s Sport High Lights, published in the Sunday Dispatch (London, England) of Sunday 25^th August 1935 [page 17, column 6]:

“Bat and Ball,” edited by Thomas Moult and published this week by Arthur Barker, […] is the most beautifully produced and sensitively written cricket book I have read for many years.
It captures the real, happy spirit of the game; it is packed with information, and the writing flows with the even tenor of an English stream. The contributors are crystal clear in their opinions and provocative without being controversial.
“Bat and Ball” might be described as “different.” It avoids cliches like the plague, and the deft mixture of ancient and modern will appeal to all lovers of the game.

2-: From an interview of the U.S. singer, musician, actor and radio host Rudy Vallée (1901-1986), by the U.S. drama critic William F. McDermott (1891-1958), published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio, USA) of Wednesday 16^th March 1938 [page 7, column 1]:

I complimented him on the arrangement and the literacy of his radio program.
“I don’t have much to do with the arrangement of the programs,” he said.
“The agency does that. As for the literacy of the programs, I try in my own stuff to avoid slang and trite expressions. I never use such words as ‘swell.’ I’m taking a course in better English from a Chicago school.”
Surely this Mr. Vallee, from Yale University, who talks about growing old, who is not sure that he has the talent to be a movie director, who avoids cliches like the plague and polishes his English with special study is not the popular image of the young radio-movie star bestriding the world with excessive confidence.

3-: From an article about the English author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), by Paul I. Wellman, published in The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri, USA) of Friday 15^th November 1940 [page 34, column 4]:

Wodehouse is that singular anomaly—an English writer who is a master of American slang. When he has an English character speak, the English slang rings true, and when an American character replies, the argot has not a jot of the phony about it. The reason for it is that slang fascinates him and he has always been a student of those fonts of slang perpetrations—the newspaper comics. He studied Mutt and Jeff in their hey-day, and Happy Hooligan, Rube Goldberg’s Boobs, Briggs’s cartoons, and the rest. He also made himself an authority of the cliche. Where other authors avoid the cliche as a plague, Wodehouse utilizes them with amazing effect to contribute to his humor.

4-: From a review of The Dawn of Liberation: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill C. H., M.P. 1944 (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1945), by the British statesman Winston Churchill (1874-1965), compiled by the British newspaper editor Charles Eade (1903-1964)—review published in The Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) of Saturday 9^th March 1946 [page 7, column 8]:

It has been suggested that many of Mr. Churchill’s most famous speeches will find their way into anthologies of English prose. That is indeed desirable. What is more to be hoped is that other political leaders will study his sentences and that not only for their content, but for their form. Mr. Churchill avoids the cliche like the plague. His words are not always simple, but are, indeed, occasionally magnificently resonant.

5-: From a review of The Storm Within (i.e., Les Parents terribles), a 1948 film directed by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), French playwright, novelist, poet, critic, designer and film director—review by Harry MacArthur, published in The Evening Star (Washington, District of Columbia, USA) of Wednesday 4^th October 1950 [page A–20, column 3]:

Whatever else is said of Jean Cocteau, it must be admitted that he makes his motion pictures interesting. Nobody sleeps around here when he is putting on his act. His prying, inquisitive cameras have fluid movement and he avoids the cinematic cliche as the plague, sometimes going out of his way to do it.