Thank you, Frank Bruni!
I’m certain I said “no worries” quite recently, and I cringed, though with only a small fraction of the self-loathing that I feel when I do the following face plant: “It is what it is.”
That may be the most degrading sequence of five words in the English language. It serves no essential purpose. It says nothing at all. It’s syllables for the sake of syllables, a waste of cognition and breath, the kind of tautology that an absurdist playwright might put in a character’s mouth as a commentary on the pretentiousness and pointlessness of some human communication.
I bet I heard it three times yesterday. And will hear it twice tomorrow. And, God forgive me, will say it once the day after that.
Why? Because that’s how such expressions work: They go from quirky to commonplace to overexposed to ambient. Soon you’re repeating them without intention or awareness. And that’s fine — even a blessing — with a reflexive courtesy like “please excuse me” or “my pleasure.”
But not with “it is what it is,” which marks an intellectual and moral surrender. “It’s an excuse not to better define whatever you’re trying hard not to further discuss,” Nathan Mitchell of Milwaukee wrote to me, joining a chorus of other readers, including Nancy Betz of Columbus, Ohio, and Gabe Yankowitz of Manlius, N.Y., who urged its banishment.
It relieves you of coming to a conclusion, forming an opinion, developing an action plan — and even worse, tries to be cute about it. As William Safire observed in an essay about “it is what it is” more than a decade and a half ago, “The trick to assertive deflection is in the ducking of a question in a way that sounds forthright.”
“Will the vogue use of ‘it is what it is’ become fixed in the farrago of unresponsive responses?” Safire asked. We now have the exasperating answer.
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