Is there a trend to say “at the end of the day”?
Executive summary
Usage evidence shows that “at the end of the day” is a long-standing idiom whose figurative use goes back to the 19th century [1], it rose steadily through the 20th century—becoming especially common in parliamentary speech and corporate/press contexts—and by late 20th century many commentators and surveys labeled it a clichéd overuse; some corpora suggest a peak in public institutional usage in the 1980s with signs of decline afterward [2] [3].
1. Origins and early attestations — a 19th‑century turn into metaphor
Documentary traces place a figurative meaning of “at the end of the day” in the 1800s, notably in Thomas Henry Huxley’s autobiography where the phrase serves as a “when all is said and done” judgment about a life’s work [1] [4], and multiple lexicographers and idiom sites note the phrase’s difficulty of being pinned down because literal uses obscure early metaphorical instances [4] [1].
2. The 20th‑century climb — parliament, media and workplace language
Analyses of corpora such as Hansard show a steady upward trajectory through the 20th century—single‑decade counts rising from the hundreds early on to a reported 3,845 parliamentary uses in the 1980s—evidence that institutional and political speech helped normalize the idiom [2], while grammar and writing sites record that the expression became globally available in journalism, corporate speech and broadcasting during the same period [5] [1].
3. Peak, backlash and perceived overuse — cliché status and surveys
By the 1980s and 2000s the phrase acquired the cultural label of “hackneyed” or “overused,” with writers and grammar commentators pointing to surveys (in Britain) naming it one of the most annoying office clichés and popular lists of worn-out summing-up phrases [3]; commentary pieces and stylistic guides repeatedly advise replacing it with shorter equivalents like “in the end,” reflecting a stylistic backlash rather than a claim that the phrase was disappearing [5] [6].
4. Is there a current trend? — rise, peak, and a mixed trajectory now
The reporting provided supports a clear historical rise and an identifiable peak in institutional usage around the late 20th century [2] [7], followed by signs of decline in some settings after that peak [2], but other sources emphasize continuing widespread use across media and everyday speech and warn that usage persists even if critics call it cliché [1] [8]; therefore the trend is not a simple linear ascent today but rather historical growth to prominence, cultural pushback, and uneven current use depending on context [2] [3].
5. Competing explanations and contested attributions
Commentators offer different origins for its modern ubiquity—some point to political and managerial usage (even attributing overuse in part to prominent figures like Colin Powell in popular discussion) while others claim diffusion through international broadcasting or calquing from other languages; these attributions exist in discussion but are not decisively settled by the sources provided, which focus more on usage counts and stylistic reception than on sociolinguistic diffusion models [9] [5] [10].
6. Practical reading — what the evidence means for listeners and writers
The historical and corpus evidence justifies the common intuition that “at the end of the day” became extremely popular and is often overused in formal speech, but the data also show a plateauing or decline in some institutional contexts after the 1980s rather than wholesale disappearance; critics calling it a cliché reflect stylistic preference and survey taste more than lexicographic crisis, and guidance from usage commentators is to prefer clearer or shorter alternatives when aiming for concise prose [2] [3] [6].