It’s time to face the music and accept the consequences of our word choices.

Face the music, often appearing in stories about sport or politics, is a favourite of news pages in Britain and the US as well as Asia, it seems.

In Malaysia, a college student exposed his buttocks and stomped on a photograph of the Prime Minister. “The student returned to his hometown to hide after the incident, before his parents brought him back to the city on Tuesday to face the music.” (New Straits Times, September 7)

Employment: “One particularly tricky situation is where an employee is asked to attend a disciplinary meeting for poor performance or misconduct and resigns prior to the meeting rather than `face the music’.” (Waikato Times, September 3)

Corporate: “It is standard practice for the company to write a large cheque to avoid a corporate indictment of the type that destroyed Arthur Andersen, and leave individual employees to face the music.” (The Times, July 17)

Police in New Delhi enforce anti-smoking laws: “Civic bodies — NDMC and MCD — also assured the court they have not provided licences to restaurants to run `hookah’ bars and if any are selling tobacco, they must face the music.” (The Times of India, August 31)

Cliché of the Week appears in The Australian newspaper Mondays. Clichés in the media are tracked across the world using Factiva and Dow Jones Insight.

Chris Pash’s book, The Last Whale , a true story set in the 1970s, was published by Fremantle Press in 2008.