Thought-terminating cliché

A form of loaded language that can be used to stop arguments from proceeding and end debate.

“Person 1 makes claim Y.

Claim Y sounds catchy.

Therefore, claim Y is true.”

Bo Bennett - Logically Fallacious

Thought-terminating clichés can be used to prevent arguments from proceeding by providing a speaker with a largely meaningless phrase they can recite as a false conclusion.

Much of the British public are familiar with thought-terminating clichés due to the political campaigning for the UK to leave the EU. “Brexit means Brexit”, “red, white and blue Brexit”, “no deal is better than a bad deal”, “let’s take back control” etc.

Elsewhere

Thought-terminating cliché - Wikipedia

Politicians saying Brexit means Brexit

The Brexit tackle

“Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the “illusory truth effect” – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times. Memory scientist Lisa Fazio has found that we are so primed to confuse a statement’s familiarity with veracity that the bias persists even when listeners are warned to look out for it, even when they are explicitly told the source was untrustworthy. “Some of these cliches catch on not necessarily because we believe them to be true but because they feel comfortable and are easy to understand,” she says.”