At the end of the day, I wish people would stop saying “at the end of the day.”

Not since John Dean popularized “at that point in time” during the infamous Watergate hearings has an expression been so embraced by people who can’t turn phrases on their own but are driven to use second-hand originalities.

I don’t know when politicians and pundits first began to use “at the end of the day” in the sense of “finally,” or “when all is said and done”  (a hoary cliche), but it couldn’t have been long ago. Some attribute it to Colin Powell. Others say that it, like “went missing,” is an import from England. At the end of the day, I wish we could send it back.

Even though it seems like yesterday that I first heard the expression, I find that I’m a latecomer to the anti-at-the-end-of-the-day bandwagon. One newspaper reported a poll that showed “at the end of the day” was the most irritating current cliche. I believe it.

Chris Pash of Sydney, Australia, an executive with Factiva, has begun compiling a list of the worst newspaper cliches. He’s in a position to judge, because Factiva is a database company that loads news articles from 10,000 sources, including 1,600 American newspapers. At the end of the day, he found that U.S. newspapers used “at the end of the day” 10,595 times during the first half of 2006. I’m sure the epidemic has become worse since then. The prime offenders, as you might guess, were The New York Times and The Washington Post (135 occurrences — three times every four days) and the Los Angeles Times (99 occurrences).

One definition of the phrase is “Something that you say before you say what you believe to be the most important fact of a situation.” 

Cliches abound in news reporting. I never tune in a local evening TV newscast without hearing that someone was “brutally murdered.” I’m waiting with bated breath (another cliche) for someone to report that a victim was “gently murdered.”

Pash’s list includes “level playing field,” “think outside the box,” and “wealth of experience.” Blogger Bob Baker, a deputy metropolitan editor of the LA Times, hates the word “swagger” as in “the Giants found their swagger in their Super Bowl win over the Patriots.” 

“During a three-month period in 2001,” blogged Baker, “‘swagger’ came up 938 times on Factiva. During the same period this year it had 2,077  appearances. The term ‘his swagger’ rose from 28 to 102. Maybe it’s the Johnny Depp movie, or all those Viagra commercials, but we’ve got quite enough swaggering going on these days.”

I can never figure where these expressions originate. There was a TV movie back in 1998 titled “At the End of the Day.” It was about a woman who was terminally ill with a progressive disease that threatened to rob her of all control of her life. She chose euthanasia. I don’t think the expression originated there.

It probably fell from the lips of someone with a gift for metaphor, or someone who had a speech writer with a gift for metaphor. It was then picked up ad nauseum, ad infinitum, by people without a gift for metaphor but with a copycat mentality.

Baker calls it “a cliche that poses as wisdom, yet delivers none.”

Maybe that’s why I dislike it so much.

But I think my resentment arises in part from the sense that the cliche vulgarizes a sacred time of day for young folks growing up in the rural South before television, video games and the Internet lured them indoors.

The end of the day was a special time of day. The cows had been milked and watered, the horses and mules had received their evening allowance of corn, the firewood had been hauled in, and the kindling had been split for the beginnings of the breakfast fire in Mama’s cook stove.

It was still daylight enough to see a string ball being pitched through the still air, and when it got too dark for that, the end of the day provided shadows to hide in during games of hide-and-seek. The end of the day was also a time for games such as Fox in the Lander, Giant Step and — when dark had finally settled in — “Ain’t no bears out tonight” (Daddy killed ‘em all last night).

The end of the day was a time of bare feet flying across dusty yards in countless games with rules that had never been written down, but which everybody understood and accepted. The soles of the feet had been toughened by a summer of contact with hot fields, dirt roads and briar patches until they were impervious to everything short of rusty nails and hawthorns.

And when it was time to come in and wash feet and hands and partake of supper, the end of the day still offered an interlude for sitting on the front porch at the feet of Mama and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa and listening to the stories of yesterday — stories that strengthened the bonds between generations and educated the young on family history and culture as well as current news and gossip.

At the end of the day, you felt tired but contented and ready to submit to the peace of a good night’s sleep before awaking to a tomorrow that seemed promising and nonthreatening.

That’s the kind of end of the day I wish I could go back to. I don’t want the politicians, pundits and pontificators spoiling the memory.