The Associated Press reports on the latest annual list of “Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.” The list is issued by Lake Superior State University (?). At first I thought the list was yet more evidence that some academics have too much time on their hands. Shrill kvetching about new words and usages, manifesting deep personal- and collective insecurities, was the kind of thing for which the Académie française used to be (rightly) scorned. But dogged detective work by your correspondent, consisting in its entirety of reading LSSU’s press release, has revealed that the list of banned words and phrases is a tongue-in-cheek publicity stunt, cooked up in 1975 by the school’s then-director of public relations.
The banned phrase that caught my attention was “it is what it is.” Its nominator, one Jeffrey Skrenes of St. Paul, Minnesota, is quoted as saying, “This pointless phrase, uttered initially by athletes on the losing side of a contest, is making its way into general use. It accomplishes the dual feat of adding nothing to the conversation while also being phonetically and thematically redundant.” (Emphasis mine.)
What utter twaddle. “It is what it is” is the most useful single phrase in any language. It reminds us that we need to live in and deal with the real world. There’s a natural human tendency to pretend that the world is the way we’d like it to be. At one time or another, all of us try to act as though the world is that way; worse, sometimes we insist that other people follow our lead. “Exhaustive scholarly research” (otherwise known as your correspondent’s gut feeling) indicates that this one human failing is the source of 99.3% of the world’s problems.
Happy New Year to all!
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