Jordan: If I had to ask you for the image, this phrase conjures in your head, at least before last week, it probably would have been the same as mine. A dejected coach, or a player in front of the microphones and the media being asked to explain why their team sucked.
Clip- Athletes/ Coaches: It’s unfortunate, but that’s just part of the game. You know, it is what it is. It is what it is. The Cowboys, the fans, they came, they came with it today. We’ve had any continuity and with the same five. It’s just, it is what it is.
Jordan: And that’s it, it’s basic. They lost. There’s nothing else to be done. It just is what it is. And that description applies to the phrase itself too. At least it did until someone else tried to use it to shrug away a different kind of defeat.
Clip- Trump: I think it’s under control. I’ll tell you what–
Clip- Reporter: How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.
Clip- Trump: They are dying. That’s true. And you ha– it is what it is.
Jordan: Somehow “It is what it is” has gone from a sports cliche, to brushing off a thousand deaths a day, but kept the same emotion behind it. Pitcher just didn’t have his best stuff. Goalie let in a softie. We couldn’t hit a three. We mismanaged a national response to a global pandemic. Yeah, it is what it is. And of course, once Trump takes on a phrase, so do his opponents.
Clip- Michelle Obama: Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.
Jordan: So now here we are, with a little linguistic tick that means almost literally nothing being spun in every direction. So where did the phrase come from originally? What was it intended to mean? And how did it move from sports to politics, and now everywhere else? Why has it become so common? And when people use it, when we use it, what are we trying to convey? When we say “it is what it is,” what is “it”? I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Miles Klee is a writer for Mel magazine who dug into the long history of this phrase. Hi Miles.
Miles: Hi. How’s it going?
Jordan: Oh, you know, it is what it is.
Miles: Sorry to hear it.
Jordan: Do you remember the first time that you encountered that phrase in the wild?
Miles: So I was thinking about this and I don’t think I really do remember it. I am betting that it was in the context of a post-game sports conference, like a press conference after a game. I don’t really remember at all, to be honest. It just seems like something that’s always been out there.
Jordan: Yeah. And I would say that that’s probably a safe bet. Some annoyed coach that’s annoyed he even has to explain himself.
Miles: Yeah. You know what, I’m, I’m not a huge sports person myself, but it always seems funny to me that they drag the coach in there after a big loss, and they’re kind of like haggling him about it.
Jordan: So in your mind, before you began looking into it and writing this piece, what did the phrase mean in your mind? Like what did it stand for?
Miles: Yeah, so I always thought of it as kind of filler, right? Like it’s something you say when you are out of comments, you’re out of patience maybe, and you just want to move on. It’s a statement of, you know, almost giving up, I would say.
Jordan: And once you start to look into it, how far back does it really go? Because I, like you, would probably have assumed that it originated sometime in the late nineties, early two thousands post-game locker room interview.
Miles: Yeah. So it has a really interesting origin that William Sapphire, the late, language columnist, looked up. In 1949, this guy, J. E. Lawrence, famous Nebraskan, wrote in the Nebraska State Journal about kind of the rugged frontier life. And obviously he was a big fan of Nebraska. And he was kind of pointing out that the state is rugged and tough, but that there’s kind of unflinching honesty about that. He wrote, “There’s nothing of sham or hypocrisy in it. It is what it is, without apology.” And so that’s kind of a really poetic origin. I was surprised. And it has this really deliberate kind of measured tone within the piece that he’s writing, which is this ode to kind of the frontier life and how beautifully kind of pristine it is, but how tough that makes it because there’s basically no human development on it yet. And yeah, that meaning seems so far away from the way we use it now.
Jordan: Yeah. I mean, I was struck by just how, you know, blunt and honest and straightforward that usage is. Whereas, you know, I come to almost associate the phrase now with kind of dissembling, or obfuscating, or whatever. Just, let’s not talk about the real stuff.
Miles: Yeah. In that way, it has completely reversed meaning where, you know, Lawrence was talking about looking something straight in the eye, and specifically nature, and knowing it for the reality that it is. And now, it’s euphemistic.
Jordan: And it’s also been described as a deliberate tautology. What is that, first of all, for those of us who haven’t gotten into languages?
Miles: Yeah. So one of the philosophy professors, I talked to Garrett Pendergraft who’s at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College. He’s the one who described it as a deliberate tautology. And he told me he teaches it to his logic students. Yeah. A tautology is basically a phrase that means itself. When you’re saying “it is what it is,” you’re saying, you know, something that is reflexively true. So the other example he gave is, “it’s raining or it’s not raining”. So when you say something like that, that is factually true because it either is, or it isn’t. And so when you say “it is what it is,” you are basically saying something that cannot be disproven, right? And that’s, I think, why it’s sort of a useful verbal crutch in these moments where you don’t know what to say, because no one can really tell you it’s not what it is. It is what it is. So that’s, that’s kind of what it means by deliberate tautology, but it all depends on the context, was the point he made. So, you know, what is the “it” there?
Jordan: Right. And how is it used? Because this is one of the things that I find really striking and somewhat disconcerting about this phrase and just the rise of it in general, is that, you know, to your point, it’s something that is explicitly factual and yet it often seems to be used to convey emotion.
Miles: Yeah. In the sports context that there’s definitely an air of defeat about it. But it is also an attempt to move on. I think when you say “it is what it is,” it is this shortest possible shortcut from there to the next topic, because you don’t like what’s being discussed right now.
Jordan: So explain that. And maybe, for people who aren’t as tuned into the American political news cycle– and lucky them– explain how it kind of reached the pinnacle of its existence last week and, and how it was used and what happened?
Miles: Right. So Donald Trump, who, you know, if anyone has kind of like a lot of verbal crutches and shortcuts, it’s him– you know, he kind of just moves from one thing to another as awkwardly and jerkily as he can– was asked about, you know, a thousand Americans dying of coronavirus every day, and said “it is what it is”. And that kind of signal to a lot of people that A) he didn’t care, B) just wanted to get onto some other topic that made him look better, and C) that he really didn’t think much of his ability to have affected a different outcome. And all three of those things are pretty bad. Because it just makes it sound like he had never even tried to effect a different outcome, or help this country face down, you know, a preventable pandemic. And, yeah, nobody likes that. I mean, people are dying and you can say “it is what it is” about losing a big game, but nobody died. When you say “it is what it is” about preventable deaths, it makes it seem they are not actually real to you. And so that is like an incredible perversion of the thing J. E. Lawrence was doing, which is, you know, there’s an unflinching honesty here. Trump is just the exact opposite of that. And so, yeah, the phrase within half a century, or 70 years I should say, really just did a complete 180.
Jordan: But yet still, he was speaking the truth, really.
Miles: Yeah, no, “it is what it is” in the tautological sense, thousands of people have died. That is the truth. And yeah, reality is reality is the most charitable spin you could put on it. He could have said “it’s a great tragedy.” I mean, even he is capable of something like that, of sort of those like gestures that empathy. But this statement just seemed completely devoid of that.
Jordan: What was the reaction to it in America?
Miles: Really, really aghast and horrified. You know, someone like Anderson Cooper went on a whole tear about it. He called it cruel and heartless. It’s been really bad. People who are in what’s termed the resistance, who are kind of these very online liberals, have now begun using it, basically sarcastically. So in the same way they might say “thoughts and prayers” to someone that they don’t think is really deserving of those things, you know, if there’s bad news for Trump or Republicans or anything like that, they’re often now tweeting, “it is what it is”. Which is to say, I don’t care that you’re suffering because you don’t care that I’m suffering. So that’s kind of where we’re at with it now. Yeah. It has become this kind of sarcastic rejoinder. And in fact, Michelle Obama used it in her DNC speech. Senator Lindsey Graham used it in a tweet. And it’s kind of very rapidly, even from what it was, it has sort of devolved in meaning. It really means even less than it ever did because people are just reflexively saying it to each other now to try to burn each other, I guess. And yeah, it’s just not landing– I would say it’s not landing anymore at all.
Jordan: It’s not even an English phrase anymore. It’s just a meme.
Miles: Yeah, exactly.
Jordan: When you asked philosophers about Trump’s use of the phrase, or even just how the phrase has changed in meaning recently, what did they say?
Miles: Yeah, so Professor Pendergraft said that it was a pretty callous thing. He saw a link to the semi-prophetic remark, “whatever will be will be,” which is, you know, just sort of a preemptive way of saying “it is what it is.” And I think that is Trump’s attitude where, you know, even at the beginning of this, he was kind of like, well, everything will work out fine. And if not, that’s fine too. You know, because it really doesn’t make a difference to him. But both he and Helen De Cruz, who’s the chair of humanities at St Louis University, pointed out that the phrase is never really associated with good news. So she was like, you know, we never say, “I won the lottery, it is what it is.” Right, it conveys an acceptance of something that we want to say is sort of inevitable, right? And I think that’s another thing that rubbed people the wrong way about when Trump used it, is these deaths were not inevitable. So why are you saying “it is what it is”? It wasn’t a hurricane that, you know, came and smashed through , that we never predicted. This was all very predictable and all the warnings were all there. So it read as a heartless dismissal, and basically saying that we never were in a position to do anything about it, which of course he was, and he’s kind of denied responsibility from the start. It’s an affirmation of reality, which is strange because he’s kind of someone who avoids reality, but it is, like I said, a euphemistic way of dealing with reality and kind of pushing it to the side.
Jordan: You also got into what three things, you know, you or I are trying to do when we use the phrase. And what are they, and how are we trying to accomplish it?
Miles: Right, so there’s three things that happen here. This has to do with the philosophy of language. And this is what Professor De Cruz explained to me. So the first, it pertains to locution, so that’s the literal meaning. That’s the tautology. It is what it is, reality is reality, one equals one. So then you have the second factor, which is illocution, that’s the intent of the speaker. What Trump is trying to say, if you even consider him as trying to create meaning, as opposed to just getting through an interview. And then there’s perlocution, and that’s how the speech act is received by the listener. So that’s when Anderson Cooper does a segment on it. That’s when people on Twitter start using it sarcastically. Perlocution is kind of what you get when you add together the speaker and the context and the listener. And that is the negative reaction from Americans who are kind of appalled that Trump would say “it is what it is” like hundreds of thousands of people dying is, you know, losing the big game.
Jordan: Well, here’s the other thing too, is that it’s so reliant on what we already know or believe at least about Donald Trump. Because there are places in– so, you know, full disclosure for this interview, I was surfing around for clips of various athletes or sports figures saying “it is what it is.” And you often come across crabby athletes who’ve just lost or whatever, but you also come across like some of the biggest and best names in sports, like, I don’t know, Bill Belichick or, you know, Novak Djokovic or whatever, which we found. And from them, it comes across as like, Well, I didn’t quite do it today, but we’re going to get them tomorrow. Which is, you know, I’m not sure if that’s the way they’re saying it or if what my own impression of them creates from it.
Miles: Yeah. I think in the sports context, sometimes you’re seeing a coach or a player kind of do the analysis in their own head of what went wrong, but they’re not necessarily spelling that all out for the listener. I think if Belichick is saying “it is what it is,” he’s kind of like running back the game in his head and thinking of, you know, what could’ve gone differently versus what actually happened. And what actually happened is what it is.
Jordan: Right.
Miles: And yeah, certainly in that context, you’re talking about applying that knowledge to, you know, the rest of your career, or the game the next day. And you are moving on from that defeat with basically more information about what you can do the next time, for sure. With Trump, it just feels like he is accepting that we’ve had this mass casualty event, and that he is willing to accept that actually far more and far worse. Because he’s certainly not going to change the way he’s doing things.
Jordan: How much further does this phrase have to travel, do you think? For lack of a better term. You sort of described where it came from and then what it became in the world of sports, and then what it became when Trump used it, and now what it’s become, even in the, you know, 8, 10 days since he used it. How much more can this thing shift?
Miles: Yeah, like I said, I think it has already become a pet peeve of a lot of people. When I started writing this piece, it was because a coworker of mine, you know, had heard it and said, you know, I always thought that was one of the stupidest things I ever heard, and it always annoys me. Because to him, it was always meaningless. And we know that it’s not quite meaningless, and that it actually has the capacity to really upset people because of the context in which it was just used. I think it will continue to be a kind of knee jerk comment. And like I said at the beginning, just a filler. We all have these kind of verbal stumbles and patches and tricks and cliches, and we’re kind of addicted to cliche, I think, in language. And we will continue to use it basically whenever we feel pressed against the wall about some uncomfortable fact. That will always be what it is. It is what it is. And when we say that, we’re also surrendering some responsibility for it. And I think that’s the phase that we’re moving into now. So in the sports world, it was always kind of an admission of defeat and guilt. And, you know, maybe I was responsible for that. That’s no longer the case. Now it is much more of a, I wash my hands of it and you’re on your own.
Jordan: Right, I have no control over this.
Miles: Yeah. Yeah. You’re on your own. And I don’t, you know, I don’t feel any special empathy or pity for you. It’s, like I said, it’s like the thoughts and prayers thing now. So we are now just signifying kind of the emptiness of our own response, which is another weird kind of way of reducing the phrase to, yeah, just diving into the hollowness of it. And, yeah, I don’t, in a way, it’s become even more hollowed out than it was.
Jordan: What about, you know, a couple of generations from now? And I only ask this not to ask you to peer into the future of language, but because, you know, you said that this phrase first appeared in, you know, the ’40s, and then most of us don’t remember hearing it at all until, you know, the 2000s. And now it is, at least in my mind, and people can disagree if they want, but so tied to this particular era that it might become a relic of that. You know, and I could probably list them off the top of my head, but there are so many phrases from the 1990s that now, you know, we really don’t use in the way that we used them at all. Because they’re forever tied to that time.
Miles: Yeah. It could end up sounding old fashioned actually, I think. And yeah, 20 years from now, maybe I will say it and sound like an old fogey because it is a cliche or an expression from another time, you know, certainly we’re not really talking the way we were 30 years ago, we’re not talking like the way we were in the ’40s, and these things change, but they’re also circular. So it could be that it came back into vogue. It’s really hard to understand how it came back into style. There’s not really a good explanation for how it made the leap from a semi-obscure Nebraska newspaper in the ’40s to, you know, sports press conferences in late nineties, early two thousands. But yeah, even that was kind of a while ago. And we could have, we could be seeing a peak of it right now, since people are kind of using it vindictively. It could be kind of considered cringey or cliche because of that. I know a lot of people who would, you know, make fun of the resistance folks using it all the time. And just saying, well, that’s kind of lame and it’s always lame to try to nail Trump for his hypocrisy and all that because he doesn’t care. So why are we clinging to this phrase? Why are we trying to own him with it? And, yeah, we probably will eventually let it go. And then all it takes is one person using it again and 20 years down the road and a few people saying, Oh, that’s kind of interesting. And then it can acquire this whole new life again.
Jordan: Before I let you go, are you, after having written this piece a week ago, more or less likely to use the phrase in your own life?
Miles: Ooh, good question. I want to use it less. I don’t think I was ever one for using it. But now it’s in my brain. Like I can’t dislodge it, right? So the temptation to use it is much more present. I think, for me, I don’t know. I’m kind of maybe a self-deprecating ironic sort of personality and yeah, I think that’s probably the way in which I’d use it. Or maybe if, you know, if my girlfriend complained that I like left the fridge door open, I might say, “it is what it is,” you know? Like, I would just use it at the stupidest possible way, but to amuse myself, perhaps.
Jordan: But it’s there.
Miles: Yeah, it is there.
Jordan: It’s lodged in your head, you can’t control it, it is what it is.
Miles: Yeah. It’s gonna come out whether I like it or not. So I may as well figure out a fun way to use it because, yeah, there’s no use for pressing it, I think.
Jordan: There you go. Thanks so much for chatting about this with us, Miles.
Miles: Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me.
Jordan: Miles Klee from Mel Magazine. That was The Big Story. It was what it was. If you would like more, you can find them on our website at thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can also email us. The address is thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com. You can find us on Twitter at @thebigstoryFPN. You can find us and all our brother and sister podcast at frequencypodcastnetwork.com. And of course, we’re all in every single app. And if you can rate and review us, do that. If you can’t then just subscribe and listen and tell your friends. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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