What a corny cliche. You can say that about anything. Will your dog win the lottery? Will the sun come up tomorrow? Will Burke and Wills return? Well, only time will tell . . . Avoid corny cliches, especially vague, meaningless ones.
A cliche is a phrase that was clever once, fifty years ago, and has been worn smooth by overuse ever since. The trouble is that it slips into your copy without you noticing, because you have read it ten thousand times. Your job is to notice it, and then to kill it.
The newsroom has its own favourites. A fire is never just bad, it is a "raging inferno". Residents are always "left reeling". A near miss happens "in the nick of time". A community is forever "tight-knit", a search is "against the clock", and a minister always "slams" the opposition. When you reach for one of these, stop. The reader's eye slides straight over it and takes in nothing.
The cure is simple. Say what actually happened, in plain words. Instead of "the community was left reeling", tell me that three shops burned down and forty people lost their jobs. The facts are always stronger than the cliche, because the facts are real and the cliche is just noise.
So train your ear. If a phrase sounds familiar, if you feel you have heard it before, you almost certainly have, and so has your reader. Find a fresher way to put it, or better still, just state the plain fact and move on.